Wetzel Augustine A Guide For The Perplexe

AUGUSTINE:
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

Continuum Guides for the Perplexed
Continuums Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible
introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can
find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the
subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas,
guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material.
Guides for the Perplexed available from Continuum:
Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed, Alex Thomson
Arendt: A Guide for the Perplexed, Karin Fry
Aristotle: A Guide for the Perplexed, John Vella
Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed, Philip Schofield
Berkley: A Guide for the Perplexed, Talia Bettcher
Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed, Claire Colebrook
Derrida: A Guide for the Perplexed, Julian Wolfreys
Descartes: A Guide for the Perplexed, Justin Skirry
The Empiricists: A Guide for the Perplexed, Laurence Carlin
Existentialism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen Earnshaw
Freud: A Guide for the Perplexed, Celine Surprenant
Gadamer: A Guide for the Perplexed, Chris Lawn
Habermas: A Guide for the Perplexed, Lasse Thomassen
Hegel: A Guide for the Perplexed, David James
Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed, David Cerbone
Hobbes: A Guide for the Perplexed, Stephen J. Finn
Hume: A Guide for the Perplexed, Angela Coventry
Husserl: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matheson Russell
Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed, T. K. Seung
Kierkegaard: A Guide for the Perplexed, Clare Carlisle
Leibniz: A Guide for the Perplexed, Franklin Perkins
Levinas: A Guide for the Perplexed, B. C. Hutchens
Locke: A Guide for the Perplexed, Patricia Sheridan
Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed, Eric Matthews
Nietzsche: A Guide for the Perplexed, R. Kevin Hill
Plato: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gerald A. Press
Pragmatism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Robert B. Talisse and Scott F. Aikin
Quine: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Kemp
Relativism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Timothy Mosteller
Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed, David Pellauer
Rousseau: A Guide for the Perplexed, Matthew Simpson
Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed, Gary Cox
Socrates: A Guide for the Perplexed, Sara Ahbel-Rappe
Spinoza: A Guide for the Perplexed, Charles Jarrett
The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed, M. Andrew Holowchak
Utilitarianism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Krister Bykvist
Wittgenstein: A Guide for the Perplexed, Mark Addis
AUGUSTINE:
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
JAMES WETZEL
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
James Wetzel 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-8470-6195-9
PB: 978-1-8470-6196-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wetzel, James.
Augustine : a guide for the perplexed / James Wetzel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-84706-195-9 ISBN 978-1-84706-196-6
1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. I. Title.
B655.Z7W468 2010
189'.2dc22
2009044688
Excerpt from Rilkes Turning-Point, trans. William H. Gass, in Reading Rilke:
Reflections on the Problems of Translation, copyright 1999 by William H. Gass;
reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
Fragment 43, in Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, trans.
Brooks Haxton and copyright 2001 by Brooks Haxton; reprinted by permission
of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Excerpt from The Dry Salvages in Four Quartets, copyright 1941 by
T. S. Eliot and renewed 1969 by Esme Valerie Eliot; reprinted by permission
of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
To the memory of
Father Thomas Frank Martin, O. S. A. (19432009),
lover of Augustine.
Pondus meum amor meus; eo feror, quocumque feror.
Conf. 13.9.10
[My weight, my love; I will be borne by it, wherever
I will be borne.]
This page intentionally left blank
vii
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations of Works Cited x
Note on Translations xiv
Figures Invoked xv
Prologue: A Life Confessed 1
Chapter One: Death and the Delineation of Soul 11
Virtue Comes to Grief 17
Ciceronian plot 17
Augustinian dnouement 21
The Materialization of Loss 30
Trappings of woe 30
A grievable God 38
Chapter Two: Sin and the Invention of Will 44
Pathos of Will 52
Place of unlikeness 52
Debriefing on beauty 60
Beauty Memorialized 63
From Plato to Paul 63
The emotion of time 70
Chapter Three: Sex and the Infancy of Desire 77
The Mythology of Sin 83
Grace and original guilt 83
Adam, Eve, and the angels 87
viii
CONTENTS
Conversion 95
The tie that unbinds 95
Learning a first logos 105
Almost an Epilogue: Time Troubled 113
Suggestions Readings Chapter by Chapter 127
General Suggestions for Further Reading 136
Index 141
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Augustine was never without friends; they reminded him both of the
limitation of words and of their great promise. I owe a similar debt
of memory to my friends. I want to thank John Bowlin, Michel
Barnes, Kathleen Skerrett, Joshua Ramey, and Amisha Patel for
reading portions of my typescript and lending me their insights.
Eric Gregory, Chuck Mathewes, Jesse Couenhoven, Jonathan Yates,
Stanley Hauerwas, Coleman Brown, Anne Ashbaugh, David Burrell,
and John Cavadini have for years been gently inspiring my engage-
ment with Augustine. I also want to acknowledge what a boon it
has been for me to work at Villanova with Augustinian priests and
educators: the late Tom Martin, Marty Laird, Allan Fitzgerald,
Danny Doyle, Barbara Wall, and Peter Donohue, to name a few.
Finally I want to thank my family for giving me the time to write
this book. Faced the choice of picking up with Augustine or picking
up my infant son, Rowan, I sometimes went with Augustine. Of
course I could not expect my son to understand. I am not sure that
I do. But my wife, Nathalie, helped me to live with my choice and
graciously picked up where I left off. I end with a special word of
thanks to my daughter, Anna, who paid me the undeserved grace of
missing me most of all.
Feast Day of St. Augustine, 2009
x
ABBREVIATIONS OF WORKS CITED
AUGUSTINE
[abbreviation Latin title, edition, translated title, date of composition]
an. et or. De anima et eius origine, CSEL 60, On the Soul
and its Origin (419/420)
b. conjug. De bono conjugali, CSEL 41, On the Good of
Marriage (401)
c. Acad. Contra Academicos, CCL 29, Against the Skeptics
(386/387)
c. ep. Pel. Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum, CSEL 60,
Against Two Letters of the Pelagians (421)
civ. Dei De civitate Dei, CCL 4748, City of God (413/427)
c. Jul. Contra Julianum, PL 44, Against Julian (421/422)
c. Jul. imp. Contra Julianum opus imperfectum, CSEL 85, Against
Julian, the unfinished sequel (429/430)
conf. Confessiones, ODonnell, Confessions (397/401)
corrept. De correptione et gratia, BA 24, On Admonition and
Grace (426/427)
doc. Chr. De doctrina Christiana, CCL 32, On Christian
Doctrine (396; 426/427)
duab. an. De duabus animabus, CSEL 25, On Two Souls
(392/393)
ep. 93 Epistula ad Vincentium, CSEL 34.2, Letter to
Vincent, Bishop of Cartenna (408)
ex. prop. Rm. Expositio quarundam propositionum ex epistula
Apostoli ad Romanos, CSEL 84, Commentary on
RomansSelected Verses (394/395)
xi
Gn. adv. Man. De Genesi adversus Manicheos, CSEL 91, On Genesis
the Anti-Manichean Commentary (388/389)
Gn. litt. De Genesi ad litteram, BA 4950, On Genesisthe
Literal Commentary (401/415)
gr. et pecc. or. De gratia Christi et de peccati originali, CSEL 42,
On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin (418)
imm. an. De immortalitate animae, CSEL 89, On the Souls
Immortality (387)
lib. arb. De libero arbitrio, CCL 29, On Free Will (387/
388; 395)
mag. De magistro, CCL 29, On the Teacher (389)
mend. De mendacio, CSEL 41, On Lying (394/395)
nupt. et conc. De nuptiis et concupiscentia, CSEL 42, On Marriage
and Sexual Desire (419/421)
pecc. mer. De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo
parvulorum, CSEL 60, On the Merits and Forgiveness
of Sins, On Infant Baptism (411)
persev. De dono perseverantiae, BA 24, On the Gift of
Perseverance (428/429)
praed. sanct. De praedestinatione sanctorum, BA 24, On the
Predestination of the Saints (428/429)
retr. Retractationes, CCL 57, Reconsiderations (426/427)
Simpl. Ad Simplicianum, CCL 44, To Simplician (396/398)
sol. Soliloquia, CSEL 89, Soliloquies (386/387)
spir. et litt. De spiritu et littera, CSEL 60, On the Spirit and the
Letter (412)
Trin. De Trinitate, CCL 5050A, The Trinity (399422/426)
util. cred. De utilitate credendi, CSEL 25.1, On the Advantage
of Believing (391/392)
vera rel. De vera religione, CCL 32, On True Religion
(390391)
virg. De sancta virginitate, CSEL 41, On Holy Virginity (401)
For further clarification of the chronology of Augustines works, see
Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald,
O. S. A. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), xliiil, pp. 299305,
pp. 774789, and Pierre-Marie Hombert, Nouvelles recherches de chronologie
augustinienne (Paris: Institut dtudes Augustiniennes, 2000).
xii
LATIN EDITIONS
BA Bibliothque Augustinienne (Paris: Institut Dtudes
Augustiniennes)
CCL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (Turnholt: Brepols)
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna:
Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky)
ODonnell James J. ODonnell, Confessions, text and commentary
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)
PL Patrologia Latina (Migne)
OTHER ANCIENTS
Aen. Aeneid (Virgil) 2919 B.C.E.
enn. Enneads (Plotinus) 253270; compiled and edited by
Porphyry sometime between 301 and 305
ep. 267 Epistula ad Atticum, Letter to his friend Atticus (Cicero)
March 45 B.C.E.
fin. De finibus bonorum et malorum, The Ends of Things
Good and Bad (Cicero) 45 B.C.E.
Tusc. Tusculanae Disputationes, Tusculan Disputations
(Cicero) 45 B.C.E.
For the Latin text of the Aeneid, see P. Vergili Maronis Opera, ed.
R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). For the Greek text
of the Enneads, see the Loeb edition, seven volumes, ed. and trans.
A. H. Armstrong, 2nd Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1989).
For Ciceros Latin, see De Finibus, ed. and trans. H. Rackham
(Harvard, 1983), Tusculan Disputations, ed. and trans. J. E. King
(Harvard, 1966), and Letters to Atticus, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton
Bailey (Harvard, 1999)volumes 17, 18, and 24.3, respectively, of
the Loeb Cicero.
BIBLICAL TEXTS
1 Cor. Pauls First Letter to the Corinthians
Gen. Genesis
Exod. Exodus
xiii
Jn. Gospel of John
1 Jn. The First Letter of John
Lk. Gospel of Luke
Matt. Gospel of Matthew
Ps. The Psalms
Rom. Pauls Letter to the Romans
1 Tim. Pauls First Letter to Timothy
xiv
NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
All the translations of Augustine and the few of Cicero are my own.
For Virgils poetry and the clipped Greek of Plotinus, it seemed wise
to lean on others. I turned to Stanley Lombardo for his resonant
translation of the Aeneid (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005) and to Stephen
MacKenna for his august, early-twentieth century translation of the
Enneads (New York: Penguin, 1991).
When quoting Genesis, I used Robert Alters translation of the
Hebrew (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) when not
translating directly from Augustines Latin. (The choice depended
on whether I was making a point about Genesis or a point about
Augustines take on Genesis.)
For those of you looking for a good translation of Augustines
Confessions, the choices abound. Here is a handful:
Gary Wills (New York: Penguin, 2006): inventive, at times insouciant,
but all-in-all a work of art.
F. J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993, a reissue): the translation
favored by Peter Brown, Augustines best biographer; each book is
prefaced by a summary outline.
Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991): not
very literary, but dependable; the scholars choice for the
classroom.
Maria Boulding (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1997): perhaps the best
combination of literary sensitivity and scholarly restraint.
xv
FIGURES INVOKED
Ambrose (339397): celebrated rhetor turned bishop; appointed
to the See of Milan in 374; his sermons in the mid 380s alert
Augustine to allegorical readings of the Old Testament and to
Platonist conceptions of divine substance; baptizes Augustine in
Milan, Easter of 387.
Antiochus of Ascalon (c. 13068 B.C.E.): first studies at Platos
Academy under the skeptic Philo of Larissa; breaks with his
teacher and founds a school that emphasizes the availability of
knowledgethe so-called Old Academy; his amalgam of Stoic
and Aristotelian ethics influences Cicero, who studies with
Antiochus in Athens in 79 B.C.E.; Augustine knows of Antiochus
via Cicero.
Aristotle (383322 B.C.E.): studies at Platos Academy some twenty
years before founding his own school of philosophy, the Lyceum;
a philosopher of extraordinary range and depth: logic, ethics,
metaphysics, political theory, literary analysis, the sciences, and
psychology. Augustine knows Aristotles Categories, a work of
logic, from a Latin translation; he gets bits and pieces of Aristo-
telian philosophy from Cicero and Plotinus. His Aristotle will
always have a veneer of Stoic ethics and Platonic metaphysics.
Augustine (354430): except for a few years in Italy, lives most of his
life in Roman North AfricaThagaste, Carthage, Hippo; bishop
of Hippo from 396 until his death; writes an astounding number
of works, the two most influential being Confessions and City of
God; his conceptions of sin and grace profoundly inform the
development of Western Christianity.
xvi
FIGURES INVOKED
Aulus Gellius (c. 125c. 180): Latin man of letters; grows up in
Rome, where he studies literature, rhetoric, and grammar; travels
to Athens to study philosophy; best known for his miscellany of
anecdotes and notes on the sciences: Attic Nights. In City of God
9.4, Augustine cites and analyzes one of his anecdotes about a
Stoic sage.
Caelestius (flourished early 5th century): disciple of Pelagius, shows
up in Carthage soon after the sack of Rome in 410 and is refused
ordination to the priesthood; he becomes a focal point for North
African opposition to Pelagian theologyprimarily to its denial
of the heritability of Adams guilt (original sin).
Chrysippus (c. 280c. 206 B.C.E.): Greek philosopher from Soli;
considered, along with Zeno of Citium, to be a co-founder of
Stoicism; Chrysippus greatly expands and elaborates the original
teachings of Zeno.
Cicero (10643 B.C.E.): Romes most famous orator; in the last years
of his life he works to translate Hellenistic philosophy into a Latin
idiom; when the young Augustine reads Ciceros Hortensius for
the first time, he becomes, at age 18, an enthusiast for the philo-
sophical life.
Descartes (15961650): French philosopher and mathematician, one
of the formative minds of modern philosophy; his master work,
Meditations on First Philosophy, treats God and soulthe tradi-
tional foci of theological speculationas demonstrably knowable
subjects. Antoine Arnauld, a logician and theologian of deep
Augustinian pieties, points out to Descartes that his means of
demonstrating the necessary existence of the thinking subject
(the so-called cogito) has much in common with Augustines
response to skepticism. (The resemblance is actually superficial,
as Descartes himself recognizes.)
Donatus (d. c. 355): the charismatic bishop who inspires the uncom-
promising form of Christianity that takes its name from him:
Donatism; his succession to the See of Carthage in 313 deepens a
schism within the North African church that lasts well into the
fifth century. Augustine champions the Catholic side and spends a
good deal of his episcopate trying to convince or compel Donatists
to return to the fold.
Faustus of Milevus (flourished late 4th century): a Manichean adept
with a reputation for great learning, probably only a few years
older than Augustine; becomes a Manichean bishop in 382 and
xvii
FIGURES INVOKED
leaves his wife and children. When Augustine meets him at
Carthage, he likes the man personally but finds his learning hol-
lowthe death knell for Augustines attraction to Manicheism.
Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 B.C.E.c. 30 C.E.): born in Roman Palestine
during the reign of Herod the Great, is baptized as a young man
by John the Baptist, has a 3-year ministry in and around Galilee,
dies in Jerusalem by way of crucifixion on orders from Pontius
Pilate, the Roman Prefect of Judea; considered by most Christians
to be the Christ, the anointed one, the only begotten son of God,
the Word made flesh. As an auditor among Manichees, Augustine
adopts the gnostic view of Christ and assumes that his gross
material formhis physical bodyis just a veil for his spirit;
shortly after his disillusionment with Manicheism he takes Christ
to be the epitome of a sage but not divine; by the time he writes his
Confessions, Augustine is settled in his belief that God has become
fully incarnate in Jesus Christ.
Julian of Eclanum (c. 380c. 454): becomes bishop of Eclanum in
417, one of eighteen bishops to refuse to sign Pope Zosimus
condemnation of Pelagius and Caelestius, eventually is forced
into exile; accuses Augustine of defaming marriage, confusing
vice with natural desire, and generally reverting to a Manichean
view of the flesh. Augustines last, unfinished work (c. Jul. op.
imp.) is dedicated to answering these charges.
Lucretius (c. 94c. 50 B.C.E.): Latin poet and philosopher, best
known for his epic, On the Nature of Things, whose hero is the
atom; the poem exults scientific discipline and simple living
over religious superstition, fear of death, and dreams of glory.
His artfully Latinized version of Epicurean philosophy has a big
influence on Virgil.
Mani (216277): born in Persian-controlled Babylonia to a family of
Aramaic speakers whose Christianity remained within Judaism;
after two angelic revelations, one at age 12, the other at age 24,
he takes on the task of completing the revelation he believes has
been authentically but imperfectly conveyed through Buddha,
Zoroaster, and Jesus; pitches his religion of light against the
dark forces that imprison souls in gross matter and perpetuate
ignorance. Manicheism spreads east and west after Mani falls
afoul of Zoroastrian priests and the new Persian king, Bahram I,
has him executed. Augustine spends about 10 years as a Manichean
auditor, but as a Christian bishop he styles himself unambivalently
xviii
FIGURES INVOKED
anti-Manichean; the Manichees known to him think of them-
selves as Christian.
Marcus Aurelius (121180): the Roman philosopher-emperor, best
known for his book of personal meditations on Stoic wisdom,
which he writes in koine Greek while on military campaign against
the German tribes.
Monnica (331387): Augustines mother, born into a Catholic
family in Donatist Thagaste; is about 23 when Augustine is
born, who is perhaps her first; Navigius, his brother, and a girl
whose name is unknown are to follow. Her determination to see
Augustine a Catholic Christian is legendary; even her pagan
husband, the somewhat hot-tempered Patricius, bows in the end to
her gentle insistences and accepts a late-in-life baptism. Shortly
before her death, at the port of Ostia, she and Augustine share a
mutual rapture together, a foretaste of perfect communication
(conf. 9.10.2325)
Paul (c. 4 B.C.E. c. 64 C.E.): the apostle of the resurrected Christ,
gets converted to the Jesus movement within Judaism soon after
having a blinding vision on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:122);
most of his ministry is to the emerging Gentile churchesthe face
of the new Christianity. Augustine reads Paul intensively, Romans
especially, in the mid 390s, and has his view of divinehuman rela-
tions fundamentally altered.
Pelagius (c. 354c. 418): born in Britain; heads to Rome around 380,
probably with the intent to study law, but ends up a worldly ascetic,
filled with zeal to live and inspire the godly life of virtue; has a
sojourn in North Africa shortly after Romes fall to the Visigoths,
and there he comes to the attention of Augustine and the North
African bishops. His morally muscular version of Christianity
gets him into trouble; he is taken to be denying human bondage to
sin and therefore minimizing the need for a savior. Though cleared
of heresy at the regional synod of Diospolis in 415, the North
Africans never give up their animus against him. A couple of years
after being condemned by two separate African councils (Milevis
and Carthage in 416), he finally falls out of favor with both the
Pope and the imperial court; thats the last we hear of him.
Petrarch (13041374): humanist of the Italian Renaissance and
an avid reader of Augustines Confessions; takes a pocket copy of
that texta gift from his former Augustinian confessorto the
summit of Mount Ventoux in Southern France and reads the
xix
FIGURES INVOKED
part where Augustine expresses wonder at his own interior depths
(conf. 10.8.15); less given than Augustine to worldly withdraw,
Petrarch will find his depths on his way to literary heights, a secu-
lar ascent.
Plato (c. 428c. 347 B.C.E.): inventor of the philosophical dialogue,
arguably of philosophy itselfas a peculiar kind of paideia.
Augustines knowledge of Plato is fragmentary and second-hand,
mediated through Latin translation, excerpting, and commentary,
but he gives Plato full credit for having wed the contemplative
aspiration to know the real to the practical ambition of living an
engaged and choice-worthy life.
Plotinus (205270): born in Egypt, studies philosophy in Alexandria,
opens his own school in Rome in 245; in addition to the singularly
committed male ascetic, women and professional types are
welcome; his student and friend, Porphyry, collects his writings
into six sets of nine treatisesthe Enneadsand publishes
them some 30 years after his teachers death. The vision unfolded
there is, to say the least, extraordinary: a meditation on oneness,
eternal mind, soul in descended and undescended forms, and
the discord that is materiality. When Augustine first reads some
portion of the Enneads in Latin translation, his sense of God
fundamentally alters.
Porphyry (c. 234c. 305): Phoenician (Lebanese) born student of
Plotinus, also his editor and biographer; Plotinus saves Porphyry
from a suicidal depression by noticing it, paying him an unex-
pected visit, and counseling him to go on holidayhe does, but as
a consequence is absent when Plotinus falls sick and dies. His
greatest tribute to his teacher will be his compilation and editing
of the Enneads. He writes many things of his own as well, includ-
ing a notorious critique of the Christian religion.
Socrates (c. 470399 B.C.E.): Platos teacher, the persona of the
philosophical life; lives a life of incessant questioning, bent on
knowing the good; is condemned to death in 399 B.C.E. by a
majority of his fellow Athenians for worshipping gods strange to
the city and corrupting impressionable minds. Augustine admires
Socrates for his moral fervor, but admires Plato more for setting
that fervor within a more contemplative framework.
Vincent of Cartenna: a Rogatist bishop, Rogatists being more Donatist
than Catholic in their ecclesiology, but disillusioned with the vio-
lent tactics of the Donatist fringethe so-called Circumcellions
xx
FIGURES INVOKED
(named for their habit of congregating around small farm houses);
in a lengthy letter (ep. 93, c. 408), Augustine recounts to Vincent
his reasons for supporting imperial measures against Donatism
and, by extension, Rogatism.
Virgil (7019 B.C.E.): Romes answer to Homer, author of the epic
poem, Aeneid. Augustine knows Virgil well, the Eclogues and
Georgics included, but it is the Aeneid that first informs his boy-
hood fancies and then shapes his theological imagination for the
antithesis to Gods city. Virgils fictional ideal of an eternal empire,
a pax Romana without end, is for Augustine a passing illusion of
the civitas terrena, the kingdom of this world.
1
PROLOGUE: A LIFE CONFESSED
Look, my life is a stretch.
Augustine, Conf. 11.29.39
Augustine was born on the 13th of November 354 in the town of
Thagaste in Roman North Africa. His historical placement puts him,
on the one hand, in a fallow period in the history of philosophy, at
least by conventional standards, and, on the other, in one of the rich-
est times in the history of theology. To scholars of Patristics, who
study the theological formation of the early Christian church (roughly
from the end of the first century to some indeterminately medieval
beginning), Augustine is a titanic figure. No one in the increasingly
Latinized West can rival the literary achievement of the man who
wrote Confessions, City of God, and The Trinitythese being only
the most celebrated items in a vast collection of writings whose depth
and insight continue to this day to surprise.
Meanwhile his philosophical readers, for whom Patristics is an alien
category, can barely find a way to place him at all. Augustine is too
distant from Plato and Aristotle, and frankly too Christian, to be
considered classical, and so he tends to be lumped in with the under-
appreciated medieval figures in canonical histories of philosophy.
Mostly he gets compared to Thomas Aquinasone of the first
university professors of philosophywho, unlike Augustine, made a
big point of distinguishing properly philosophical theology from extra-
rational revelation. The other tendency is for Augustine to get slipped
into philosophys history as a proto-modern. Antoine Arnauld, a con-
temporary of Descartes and Pascal, was only the first to claim that the
Cartesian discovery of an indubitable thinking selfimmaterial,
impersonal, and uniquely capable of knowledgehas a precedent in
AUGUSTINE: A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
2
Augustines conception of a self-related mind. In general Augustine is
credited with having a peculiarly modern sense of selfhood, but this
usually has more to do with the agonized self-consciousness of his
confessional persona than his interest in a dematerialized psyche, or
with what makes him seem more like a Dostoevsky than a Descartes.
Augustines slippery presence within the margins of philosophical can-
onizations makes his outsized theological stature all the more striking
but also perplexing. Is it really possible to have a highly articulate,
hugely influential vision of religious possibility and not in some
substantial way be cultivating a philosophy? What does it say about
our intellectual culture, about us, if we find it relatively easy, even unre-
markable, to tell stories about the past that partition off the history of
our reverences from the history of our philosophical inquires?
I ask these questions keenly aware of the difference in cultural
moment between Augustines day and our own. He was born after
the fateful conversion of emperor Constantine to Christianity but
before Christianity became the only sanctioned way of being Roman.
Augustines father, Patricius (Patrick), was a pagan until soon before
his death, when he accepted baptism; his mother, Monnica, grew up
with a Christianity that was still mostly a cult of reverence for local
saints and martyrs. As he came to his own, not always consistent, sense
of a catholic faith, Augustine would have to negotiate a pluralistic
mix of religious ritual and philosophical ambition, fluidly pagan and
variously Christian. When he dies in August of 430, after more than
30 years as bishop of the port city of Hippo, his version of Christianity
will have become, at least nominally, the imperial choice. In 380
Theodosius outdoes Constantine and makes Catholic Christianity the
official religion of the Roman imperium; some 10 years later we find
him outlawing pagan worship. The emperor Honorius, ruling after the
partition of the empire into East and West, not only continues the
imperial campaign against Romes ancestral religions; he also weighs
in against Donatism, the more home-grown form of Christianity in
Roman North Africa. In 405 Honorius issues the Edict of Unity and
Donatism is declared a heresya Christianity too defiant, too proud,
too anti-Roman to be sustained. The problem for the favored form of
Christianity was that its catholicity was being fitted out with the clay
feet of a far-from-eternal empire. Lying on his death-bed while Vandals
were blockading Hippo and preparing to besiege the city, Augustine
surely knew this to be the case. We who live on the other side of Christian
hegemony have the long view on the devils pact between political
PROLOGUE
3
power and religious affiliation; we also, as children of the genocidal
twentieth century, know something about the cruelty of which secular
regimes are all too capable. We live in fragilely pluralistic times,
hounded by resurgent fundamentalisms and bereft of a benignly secu-
lar sanctuary. We are far from Augustines moment.
So what can we expect from reading him again, assuming that we
have grown tired of both religious nostalgia and secular indignation?
I keep using the first person plural. I should come clean about my
presumption. I am not writing a guide to Augustine for Christians,
much less for Augustinian Christians, though I am, in more ways
than not, an Augustinian Christian myself. I am not writing to
convince a secular audience of the secular value of a suitably pruned
Augustinianism, though I dont deny that this exercise can be of
some ecumenical interest. I am writing to those who are willing to
entertain the notion that the history of their reverences includes
more than the history of their current allegiances. More to the point,
I am writing to those who are willing to entertain this notion but are
perplexed by how to do so in practice.
Philosophers generally have no trouble with the idea that it is
possible to take wisdom from a Plato or a Chrysippus and not have
to become a card-carrying Platonist or a Stoic. But this catholicity,
admirable as it is, has a much harder time taking in more religiously
identified thinkers. In the Apology, the dialogue that dramatizes
Socrates day in court, Plato ties his teachers philosophical vocation to
a form of religious piety; Socrates turns to philosophy out of respect
for the Delphic Oracle and his faith that the god must be telling him
the truth, however hard the truth may be for him to interpret. He
becomes a philosopher, a true craver of wisdom, when he resolves to
understand what the god means. I dare say that few contemporary
philosophersPlatonist or otherwiseagonize much over Platos
faith in Apollo when trying to get at the meaning of Platonism. Mat-
ters are very different when it comes to Augustine. The comparatively
few philosophers who include him in their catholicity make a conscious
effort to divest his philosophy from his allegiance to his church and his
love of Christ. Partly this is because of history: Christianity, not pagan-
ism, becomes the dominant, sometimes domineering, religion of Europe
and its colonizing efforts. (And what is more bluntly contrary to phil-
osophy than coercion?) Partly this is because of Augustine himself.
Unlike Plato, he explicitly ties the pursuit of wisdom, or true religion,
to a prior acceptance of dogmatic authority (util. cred. 9.21): Apart
4
from believing the beliefs that we later grow to understand and follow,
if we acquit ourselves well and are worthy, true religion cannot, absent
authoritys weighty power, be rightly enteredno way. These words
suggest the disposition of a religiously identified thinker: they exult
belief over doubt, favor interpreting over knowing.
But here we need to be careful. The assumption that either consigns
Augustine to a Patristics cul-de-sac or exports him unceremoniously
into the Middle Ages (philosophys Age of Faith) has him assuming
beliefs without trying very hard to understand them. Imagine a hypo-
thetical argument between two philosophersa self-described empiri-
cist and a faithful Augustinian. Lets grant that they have the same
basic conception of how to reason. They start with premises that they
deem to be true and important, and they attempt, when drawing impli-
cations, to rely as firmly as possible on the truth of the foundational
premises (basically a matter of maintaining consistency). Having them
begin with different premises, we can expect, given their common form
of reasoning, that they will end in different places. The empiricist tells
you that to be an empiricist you must begin with the premise that all
knowledge is based on the senses; the farther away a claim is from veri-
fication in sense experiencee.g., the claim that God is immaterial
the less likely it is that a claim to knowledge is being made, much less a
false one. The Augustinian tells you that God is the reality most worth
knowing, that nothing else, like, say, the sensed world, is all that real
when compared to God. To come to know God, the Augustinian
continues, you must begin with the premise that the sublime father of
all things, the creator of heaven and earth, has entered human aware-
ness most intimately by way of the birth, life, death, and resurrection
of Jesus of Nazareth, his only begotten son. The Incarnation is your
meditative point of departure for a knowing life.
I have, for effect, made the two sides sound as alien as possible to one
another, and the easiest way to do this was to make the Augustinian
sound unabashedly devotional, the empiricist soberly philosophical.
One way philosophers have had to adjudicate this sort of difference
has been to assume that a secular premise, having no religious intona-
tion, is readily intelligible to all (i.e., we know what makes it true or
false), while a religious premise, being dressed in the language of a
particular faith, is intelligible, if at all, only to the practitioners of that
faith. But if the proper context of philosophical inquiry is cosmos and
not church, philosophers being assumed to be the most cosmopolitan
of thinkers, then this form of adjudication is not going to come out
PROLOGUE
5
well for the religiously identified philosopher. Augustine will be granted
philosophical credentials in as much as his vision of things can be
abstracted and assessed apart from his specifically Christian commit-
ments. As for what remains, the stubbornly sectarian part, that will
define for us an Augustine who is a man of his times, socially condi-
tioned to clip his own wings and maintain the status quo.
The minority response from within philosophy to a condescending
and perhaps overly self-confident philosophical secularism has been
to try to level the playing field. So what if the empiricist premise seems
simpler and less culturally invested than the Augustinian alternative?
Appearances can deceive. Were we to investigate the matter more
thoroughly, we would discover that the foundations of the empiricist
world-view are no more self-authenticating, no more self-founding,
than the cardinal truths of the Christian faith. Faith-disdaining
empiricists would soon begin to look less cosmopolitan and more like
self-deceived sectarians. Meanwhile the self-aware Augustinians
continue to acknowledge their debt to their church and philosophize
with all due humility. The problem with this picture of the contest
between secular and religious philosophy is that it distorts, in an
all-too-tempting way, what Augustine tries to mean by church.
Suppose that you are puzzled by the choice between the empiricist
and the Augustinian. Neither philosophy seems intuitively obvious
to you in its foundational premise, but it strikes you that it matters,
and matters a great deal, whether you live your life more like an
empiricist or more like an Augustinian. You take the empiricist to be
telling you that your best course in life is to ground yourself in the
self-evident facts of your situation, steel yourself against the fanta-
sies of your fears and false hopes, and work patiently to get to know
the world that you have been given to know. You take the Augustinian
to be telling you that your world is laced, perhaps infused, with the
mystery of divinity; it has walked in your shoes, so to speak; your
best course in life will be to strive humbly to discern difference
between the mystery that you manufacture to keep others in their
place and the mystery that comes through your compassionate desire
to connect. How will you choose between these paths?
If you look to the Augustine who is writing less than 10 years past his
conversion (and this includes both the leisured contemplative and the
young priest), he will tell you to associate yourself with the better class
of people. Lets say that the Augustinians, as a self-supporting group,
prove to be more virtuous as a community than the empiricists: that
6
will be sufficient evidence, given a view of knowledge that unifies fact
and value, that the Augustinians have the better claim for the truth of
their foundational premise. This early view of his, in terms of the way
I have just described the options, is actually more empiricist than
Augustinian: it assumes that there is a fact of the matterthe supe-
rior goodness of one person or group over anotherthat can be
exploited to define an authentically wisdom-seeking community,
a true church, and secure it against its ignorant and badly behaved
rivals. He loses his hold on this kind of imperious empiricism, how-
ever, soon into his tenure as bishop of Hippo, near the beginning,
that is, of his big responsibilities as a church leader. His sense of what
a church is, of what it means to be either on the inside or the outside
of one, changes deeply for him. He will spend the rest his life return-
ing to that depth and attending to its mystery.
I refer to the radicalization of his doctrine of grace. Even the most
pugilistic seeker of truth has to admit at the end of the day that truth
is not the product of argument but is on occasion the blessing that is
bestowed upon the winner of an intelligent fight; on other occasions,
the winning seems to lack altogether the grace of truththe winners
perspective being narrowed, not enhanced. There are all kinds of
ways in which we are made more receptive to truth: some have us
winning arguments, others losing them, some delight and uplift us
with revelations of beauty, others knock us off our feet and reveal to
us our blindness. The revelation that made Augustine most receptive
to truthand more or less knocked him off his feethas been by far
the most perplexing for his readers to comprehend. While working as
a new bishop on a bit of Romans exegesis, Augustine reluctantly
comes to the conclusion that Gods favor of Jacob, the second twin
out of Rebeccas womb, over Esau, his big brotherthe topic of
Romans 9has nothing to do with some greater potential for virtue
on Jacobs part. From the perspective of grace (what Augustine takes
Pauls perspective to be), the two brothers share the same birth,
despite Esaus head start in life. Esau, in other words, isnt being
denied grace because of his natural gifts of strength and vitality;
Jacob is being granted grace despite his apparent lack of these
same gifts. The moral of the story, when shifted to the register of
truth-seeking, was to Augustine both clear and unsettling: the desire
for truth is not a natural virtue to be perfected and rewarded; it is a
grace that compels continual transformation. Looking back on his
struggle to resist this wisdom, Augustine, now an old bishop, will
PROLOGUE
7
write (retr. 2.1): I labored on behalf of the free choice of the human
will, but the grace of God won out.
He does not mean to suggest that divine power obliterates human
freedomif that were so, how could he even confess to a conflict?
His point is that his efforts at self-assertion, bent on earning him
absolute favor and love, assume the existence of a self not yet in evi-
dence. The ultimate source of life or the great parent that Augustine
is trying to impress with his independence is still parenting him, both
from within and from without, and to whatever extent Augustine has
a self to assert, he has a cause for gratitude, not a demand for recog-
nition. This qualification of his doctrine of grace does nothing, of
course, to resolve the perplexity that the doctrine occasions; it makes
it worse in fact. The usual complaint against the Doctor of Grace is
that he undermines the rational basis of reward and punishment: his
God gives us too much help when it comes to virtue and too little
when it comes to vice. The real perplexity runs deeper than this. If I am
to be grateful for every aspect of my being that can be considered,
however meagerly, to be good, what of me is left over to express the
gratitude? I would be happy and quite grateful to be able to live a life
of gratitude, but wouldnt my gratitude have to be the one grace that
I could not, on pain of self-contradiction, credit to God? If the grace
of God preempts my freedom even to express my gratitude, I will not
thereby be diminished or repressed: I simply never will have been.
Augustine becomes Augustine, a religious genius, when he shifts his
manner of struggle with the great perplexity of being a self-conscious
but wholly derived being. He gives less effort to the attempt to reserve
for himself and the rest of us a small pocket of human initiative and
more attention to an apparent paradox of ultimate power: that the
God who parents humanity enters into our human genealogy as his
mothers baby boya stunningly mundane intervention that invites
each of us to receive, along with our universally divine parenting, a
distinctive birth, a unique beginning. There is no contradiction
between having a personality and revering oneness, not if this paradox
is only apparent. But there is a fearsome struggle in human life
Augustine calls it the struggle of sin against graceto hold onto the
appearance and resolve personality into the oneness that is either
jealously one or guardedly other (same difference). The church that
would be a sanctuary for Gods children would have to refrain from
using its beliefs to divide and conquer, even as it commits itself in
faith to a particular love. Augustine tries not to mean by church the
8
institution that has the terrible responsibility for making its beliefs
everyones. He does not always succeed in this, but he never fails to
remind us that the temptation to live in that impossible pocket of
God-free initiative (i.e., to live in hell) is always with us in this life.
Expect the church, mortal as we are, to falter.
I call him a genius not to praise him but to signal my intent to
engage him where truth and force of personality are distinct but inex-
tricable. The two ideally conjoin to reinforce and amplify one another,
but their conjunction can also be a confusion that conspires with bad
faith and self-deception. The essence of Augustines perplexing faith
is his confidence that the ideal is more real, more substantive than the
confusion. It is impossible, he thinks, to escape the confusion, or
even to want to escape it, apart from first being claimed by the ideal.
That realization will always be a cause of gratitude, and in that grati-
tude there is both the beginning and the end of a life. Augustines
ideal of a life is of a life confessed. More often than not, confession
connotes an admission of wrong-doing. When Augustine thinks of
confession, he does have sin in mind, but where confession of wrong-
doing subjects a person to censure or prosecution, confession of sin
liberates a person from self-inflicted punishment. The more we learn
to speak with God, this being the root meaning of confession, the
less we will be tempted to belittle our lives and stuff them into tiny
boxes of false security. The philosophical life, as Augustine conceives
of it, is a lesson from life in how to petition for life. Only those who
think of God as life itself, he writes (doc. Chr. 1.8.8), are able not to
think absurd and unworthy things of God. And of themselves.
I lack the skill and the inspiration (and frankly the nerve) to write
philosophy in the form of a prayer, but I think I understand the
impetus to do so. In this guide to Augustine, the most confessional of
philosophers, I will give you my best sense of this impetus and what
actively resists it. Augustine is especially good at helping us see
through some of the counter-forces to a lifes liberationespecially
the ones that masquerade as desires for self-sufficiency and moral
responsibility. He is harder to follow, but still good company, when it
comes to unmasking sexual desire. I will not shy away from using his
best inspiration not only to clarify but also to challenge some of the
things that he says. I do not do this out of any sense of having wis-
dom superior to his. I respect and share his view that philosophy is
not about gaining the upper hand in an argument. It is about risking
self for the sake of truth and a more generous self. I correct expecting
PROLOGUE
9
to be corrected. I trust that I will expand rather than wither. I owe
Augustines spirit no less a confidence.
My guide falls into four chapters. The first two take up illusions of
selfhood that he struggled to combat. One of the illusions is about self-
sufficiency. Is it a reasonable wisdom to want to live outside the shadow
of loss? You know that you and yours are mortal, but you work to
become sufficiently secure in your self-conception to be able to accept
mortality and not feel diminished. The philosophy that Augustine
inherits, especially in its Romanized version, encourages him to
embrace this path, but he finds himself hoping more to grieve well
than not at all. The latter is an ideal, but not for this life. The other
illusion of selfhood, and it has a much deeper bite for Augustine,
concerns responsibility for sin. He is very tempted to embrace the
notion that sin is his one absolute initiative as a human being in a God-
governed world. It is a perverse initiative, to be surea self-defeating
form of self-assertionbut it seems nevertheless an initiative that
speaks to the essence of his individual responsibility. Augustine finds
it much easier to share his virtue with God than share his sin. The
sin-sharing seems to him disreputable for both parties. It makes him
irresponsible, and it makes God out to be corrupt. Augustine will have
to think very differently before he can learn to subordinate his respon-
sibility for sin to his more fundamental responsiveness to God. When
he is led into himself and into a new way of seeing, he is set to become
aware of the tension between Platonisms ideal and Pauls Christ
between philosophical catharsis and the resurrection of flesh.
In the third chapter, I revisit Augustines preoccupations with death
and sin, this time within the context of his myth of originshis reading
of the story of Adam and Eve in the garden. Augustine uses this story
to illustrate, but not derive, his version of the doctrine of original sin.
I criticize the part of his doctrine that has sin being transmitted from
parent to child by way of sexual reproduction. But I do this by way of
immanent critique. It is the profundity of Augustines own reading
of Genesis that suggests why sin simply cannot be construed to be
procreative. His reading tells us other things as well: about the nature of
his conversion, his torment over his sexual desire, his ambivalent love
of an incarnate God. This chapter is really the heart of the guide.
The last chapter, Almost an Epilogue, is a necessarily inconclusive
meditation on the radicalization of grace. Augustine generally gets
pegged as an eschatological thinker. This means that he expects the
last things about human lifethe final perfection of its form in some,
10
its ultimate corruption in othersto happen outside the purview of
historical time. In terms of what we can foresee, we can reasonably
expect a lack of resolution. Yesterdays sinner is potentially todays
saint, and todays saint is potentially tomorrows sinner. The play
between grace and sin, like light and shadow, infuses the time-defined
world, in some sense creates it. But there is an ambiguity in Augustines
eschatology. Does he think that our human conception of the good
remains perpetually open to revision over time, or does he subscribe
to a largely fixed conception that awaits a final, extra-temporal
fulfillment? If the latter, then Augustine would likely be identifying
Christianityor at least his version of itwith the form of the good.
God would have to supply form with substance (the divine self-
offering), but Augustine and his church should be able to establish
the right environment for the reception of an interior grace. While
I dont think that this is the best way to read Augustine, I concede
that he makes this reading tempting when he gets down to the busi-
ness of justifying imperial sanctions against the Donatists, whose
Christianity rivaled his own. Ultimately I resist the temptation and
leave him a thinker of radical grace.
I have decided, for the purposes of this guide, to engage the thought
of only a few of Augustines ancient sources. Cicero figures prominently
in Chapter One, Plotinus and Paul in Chapters Two and Three, Virgil in
the concluding meditation. I have made no attempt to supply a running
commentary on the Augustine scholarship. Somewhat artificially, but
I think justifiably, I have focused this guide on what makes Augustine
perplexing and not on what makes the vast scholarship on him perplex-
ing (a fine topic for a different book). This choice of mine should not
be taken to imply that I have no gratitude for the scholarship. There are
great riches there, and I have given you a treasure map of sorts in the
lists of suggested readings that appear at the end of the book. I have
annotated all the individual items and arranged them under headings
to give you some idea, admittedly rudimentary, of the structure of
Augustinian studies. Please dont assume that the books listed are just
the best books, whatever best might mean, or that they are a fully
representative sampling of whats out there. The field of Augustinian
studies is too vast and too diverse to represent succinctly, and I have had
to leave off many worthy titles. I will say that every book and essay on
my collective list is well worth reading.
11
CHAPTER ONE
DEATH AND THE DELINEATION OF SOUL
It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order
to find reality through suffering. Otherwise life is only a dream
more or less bad.
Simone Weil
The most famous line of Augustines expansive corpus holds center
stage in paragraph one of the Confessions (conf. 1.1.1): You stir us
and we delight to praise you, who made us yoursand so the heart
within us is restless until it rests in you. The line is undoubtedly
hopeful. The restlessness that makes an Augustine feel strange in his
own skin is not native to our human condition. We humans were
made, his prayer suggests, to aim at God and settle into the most
delightful kind of rest. Still the hope expressed here is not without its
perplexities. If the human heart is so naturally God-directed, then
why the restlessness? When did we all decide to wander off on our
own and paradoxically leave an eternally present God behind?
Perhaps we are less keen on rest or on God than Augustine is willing
to admit. And what would it mean, in any case, to rest with God,
whose power to attract and upend our most settled conceptions of
beauty is eternal? A life with God, though perhaps less desperate in
its neediness than the alternative, seems no less needy. The Augustinian
soul always needs God to live, and to live with God is to be subject to
an endless call to new life.
A little later in the Confessions (conf. 1.3.5), Augustine will describe
the house of his soul as a cramped space, badly in need of repaira
place too small and uninviting to be fit lodging for a being of infinite
worth and perfection. In the Gospel of Matthew, a Roman centurion,
worried about the health of one of his servants, petitions Jesus for
12
help but begs him off from a house call (Matt. 8:8): Lord, I am not
worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word,
and my servant will be healed. Augustine, carrying the house of his
ailing soul with him, is not too shy to ask for the house call. Too
small a house, God? Then let it be expanded by you. Too much of
a wreck? Rebuild it.
It is hardly news to students of theism that theists tend think of the
one God as incomparably grander than his human image, however
abstract or sublime the imaging. Augustine is not expecting his
renovated and newly restored soul to contain the uncontainable.
He writes his Confessions under the conviction that he lives in God
if he lives at all; even when his soul appears to be roaming about in
God-bereft places, he has not, strictly considered, left the many-
roomed domicile of his heavenly fathers house. It is God, in short,
who contains him and all his lifes possibilities. But it can still feel to
Augustine that he has become a prodigal son, squandering his gifts in
a Godless wasteland, and out of such a feeling, he can anticipate,
with a mixture of joy and self-loathing, a homecoming.
The Augustinian conception of a core self, or soul, is quite unlike
the idealized notion of selfhood that Augustine inherits from the
philosophical schools of his day. Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics,
Platonists, and Peripatetics (followers of Aristotle) all had differing
views of the highest good and differing prescriptions for how to
live by it, but in the Romanized version of their philosophical
diversitymediated to him largely through Cicero, who was himself
disposed to eclecticismAugustine was able to glean a common
moral: that the sign of a better wisdom is always a more secured self,
a self less likely to be rent by love, wracked by grief, or confused
about the source of its true power. As Augustine comes to insist on
his debt to a deity who subverts his souls prerogative of self-definition
(the subversion he calls grace), he seems at the very least to be denying
the possibility of a philosophically secured self. The still looming
question of Augustinian studies, certainly with regard to Augustines
philosophy, is whether he denies not merely the possibility but also
the wisdom of the classical ideal. If we could craft a perfect inner
peace for ourselves and live untroubled by (but not necessarily indif-
ferent to) the troubles of others, should we want that? Or is there
some lesson, vital to wisdom, that comes of having a more porous
self and so less of a capacity to keep others and their otherness on
the outside?
13
Augustine will never idealize a conflicted self. He simply lacks the
tragic sensibility. In the settled life he hopes to have with Godnot
this life but the one to comehe anticipates enjoying a happiness
undarkened by the shadow of loss, and, more significantly, he antici-
pates an end to feeling at odds with himself. No longer will part of
him want less than the happiness that his better part wants (the first
Adams problem). Of course if all that Augustine means by inner
conflict is the old struggle between virtue and vice, recast as irresolv-
able, then his hope for an end-of-time peace will express little more
than his disillusionment with philosophically prescribed self-help,
the sort meant to reform less-than-virtuous desire and not simply
restrain it. The philosophers most familiar to AugustineCicero
and Plotinus especially and, from a certain point of view, Virgil
emphasize the centrality of virtue to human well-being. They do
not claim that the virtuous life is easy or that virtue is all there is
to happiness, but nor do they insist, as if it were some brute fact
about human existence, that misbegotten desires for a bad happiness
necessarily outlast anyones personal discipline or contemplative
insight. It is reasonable, say the philosophers, to hope for (if not quite
expect) the perfection of virtue, the better part of happiness, in this
life. But undoubtedly such hope asks for a mighty ascesisa heroic
labor of mind and will.
In one of his last writings, The Gift of Perseverance (persev. 20.53),
Augustine recalls how annoyed Pelagius was at his repeated sugges-
tion in book 10 of the Confessions that God has to do the work of
personal discipline for usthis being our only shot at a higher life,
secured against, if never entirely free from, demeaning temptations.
The offending words, which, says Augustine, nearly caused Pelagius
to come to blows with the bishop who was recalling them, were these
(conf. 10.29.40, 10.31.45, 10.37.60): Give what you command;
command what you will. Pelagius was in Rome at the time; he had
begun his advocacy of Christian asceticisma secular version, since
it was meant for worldly people and not just for cloistered types
in his native Britain. He left Rome for Sicily and then for Africa in
advance of Alarics attack on Rome, the sack of 410. More than
Pelagius himself, his disciple Caelestius, who stayed in Carthage when
Pelagius moved on to Palestine, made a bad impression on the
African bishops. Caelestius questioned the African practice of infant
baptism and refused to accept the doctrine that sin, like some
congenital illness, mortgaged birth to moral incapacity and death.
14
In his view we are all much like Adam, the first human being: originally
innocent, naturally mortal, able to increase our moral stock through
self-exertion or diminish it through self-indulgence.
To be Pelagian in the narrow sense of the notion is to disdain
Augustines doctrine of original sin, his dread insistence on the
qualitative difference between an original, but forever lost, power of
moral self-determination, and the life that everyone now inherits: an
antagonism of flesh and spirit, lived under a death sentence. In the
broader sense, to be Pelagian is to want to preserve within Christianity,
a religion of death and resurrection, some semblance of classical
steadiness, the ancient confidence that we are endowed with what we
need to perfect our lifes promise: sufficient time (despite death) and
sufficient energy (despite ills of mind and body). A typical Pelagian
would underscore and not merely concede the fact that we humans
live in other than ideal circumstancesEden is definitely over. The
classical sensibility, whether pagan or Pelagian, is not insensitive to
adversity; it just refuses to acquiesce to it. A disciplined human being
(rare as that is) can use adversity to sculpt beauty of soul.
Augustine does not always make it easy for his readers to notice
the depth of his disagreement with Pelagian Christians and pagan
apologists for virtue. When he reminds his pagan readers, most ful-
somely in book 19 of City of God, that even their best philosophers
still have plenty of cause to be unhappy with life, he sounds peevish.
When he lets himself be goaded by Julian of Eclanum, his Pelagian
gadfly, into angry indictments of carnal desire, spoiled for saints and
sinners alike by Adams fall, he sounds perverse. (It takes extraordi-
nary loyalty to Augustine to be able to give his final diatribe against
Julian, c. Jul. imp.a hugely sprawling and yet unfinished worka
sympathetic reading.) Certainly the stridency of Augustines polemics
can make it seem as if he were nostalgic for life in Eden, an impression
he very much needs to discredit. The Adam he takes from Genesis
has an original ability not to sin (corrept. 12.33); such an Adam could
have earned his immortality easily. All it would have taken is simple
self-restraint: no eating from the forbidden tree (Gen. 2:17). Given
Adams environment of choiceplush garden, a fit partner, ready
access to Godhe comes off in Augustines account as a pathetically
weak-willed Pelagian. His heirs, one might hope, would be made of
sterner stuff.
But Augustine does not hope for better Pelagians, and he never
equates beatific peace with a restoration of Edenic conditions.
15
He has no nostalgia for Eden, and his Christ, the better Adam, is not
better by virtue of having an infinitely enhanced ability not to sin
(posse non peccare); on the contrary, his Christ is altogether incapable
of sin (non posse peccare) and that is his peculiar freedom, yet to be
ours (corrept. 12.35; cf. ex. prop. Rm. 1318). Christ is, in his human-
ity, the perfection that comes of having God fully enter ones house
and remake it from within. The result is not an architectural miracle
of stability but an enduring mystery of rebirth without repetition.
Much more so than their modern successors, the philosophers of
antiquity tend to identify fear of death as the singular challenge to
the life well lived. One can understand why. If I see myself as being
in the business of perfecting my own life, I am likely to be more
confident about initiating this business than securing the time I need
to bring it to completion. My virtue, such as it is, may be my own, but
I have many reasonsall bearing on the vulnerability of my mortal
framefor thinking that my time is not. If I start to worry more
about my time and less about my virtue, I risk becoming enamored
with false images of my lifes perfection.
To take an example dear to the heart of ancient moralists, I may
come to mortgage my power of self-determination to a craving for
fame. Suppose that I do something fantastically memorable: I defeat
an enemy in battle who was by all odds destined to defeat me. If others
assume that I did so by virtue of my ingenuity or courage and not
just by dumb luck, then I will win their admiration and my whole life
may come to be associated in their minds with that defining moment
of glory. The problem with this image is less my expectation that
I will live on long after my death in the memory of others than my
willingness to define the worth of my virtue in terms of someone
elses regard. Although it is a proper part of virtue to be able to
recognize and appreciate virtue in others (Aristotle thought of this
as the basis of true friendship), it is not a power of virtue to be able
to produce that effect. I cannot cause you to value me for my virtues;
I can only hope that you will have sufficiently cultivated your own
virtues so as to be in a position to enjoy and celebrate mine. And
while I can rightly take some pleasure from your virtuous esteem of
me, I cannot afford, on pain of self-contradiction, to make that
esteem part of my self-definition. I am essentially what I have made
myself to be at this moment, however you may see me. As for the time
ahead of me, I will try to live in the knowledge that deathnot only my
own, but yours as wellhas no bearing on my essential well-being.
16
The most shocking aspect of Pelagianism to the likes of an
Augustine is its acceptance of the naturalness of death. The Pelagian
Adam, formed by God out of moist clay, is as mortal as any earthen
creature; he cannot hope to escape death by way of steadfast or
superior virtue. His descendents differ from him only in the manner
of their mortal beginning, all being born of women. Augustine tells
a different story. He sees death as an evil and a punishment, one that
may be put to good use by a good God, but never with the result
of making an evil essentially good (civ. Dei 13.4). Given the close
association in mortal life between birth and death (the one leading
ineluctably to the other), Augustine will find it hard to make death an
evil without also tainting the goodness of birth. But death for him is
not finally an unqualified evil, and despite what his Pelagian critics
may have thought about his doctrine of original sin, he was not
reverting to his one-time adherence (though never wholehearted) to
a Manichean form of Christianity, where flesh is made out to be
the antithesis of spirit and not its alienated partner. Be that as it may,
the Pelagians who irked Augustine were hardly modern-day naturalists
attending to the rhythms of loss and gain in a life; they were Christian
participants in an antique strategy, astoundingly versatile, of indif-
ference to death.
Philosophers as different as Lucretius, a philosopher-poet and
Epicurean of the late Roman Republic, and Marcus Aurelius, a
philosopher-king and Stoic of the Roman Empire, could find
common cause on this issue. Out of vastly different assumptions
about the order of things (chance versus providence), they and their
philosophical kin were moved to dissociate death from loss: to their
person of wisdom, the only loss that counts is the self-willed loss
that results in ignorance and vice. Think of it this way: death and
disease may reduce you to a disorganized heap of insentient elements,
but as long as your sentience remains naturally supported, you can
create for yourself a virtuous identity, superimposed upon the
natural, that then becomes your truth. Your eventual death may
either remove your truth from the visible order or erase you
altogether (here the philosophers disagree), but no natural dimin-
isher has the power to separate you from your virtue. Brute nature
lacks such discrimination. When Pelagian Christians affirm the
naturalness of death and seem to have no use, much less feeling,
for the God who dies, they join the antique consensus about virtue
that Augustine has come to reject.
17
Most of us labor under the impression that we have more to lose in
life than our virtues. Time has an unnerving way of removing the
cultivation from our lives and returning us to simpler needsperhaps
a parting reminder of deaths complicity with birth. But the pressing
question for us, by ancient lights, is not whether we are subject to
more than self-willed loss, but whether we ought to make a virtue of
that recognition. Perhaps, after all, it is only the trying, the attempt
at cultivation, that matters. The man who prays, Give what you
command, obviously thinks not, but what manner of thinking is
this, if it is not to be, by the old Roman standards, merely a resigned
and unmanly capitulation to naked human need?
Augustines offering to philosophy of a wiser, if less self-controlled,
sense of loss is the biggest clue to his own, strikingly unclassical,
delineation of soul. I use the word clue and not a word like revelation
because it is far from obvious what the nature of the grief is that is
better suffered than transcended. No doubt it is remarkable, given
the influence on him of the ancient schools, that Augustine thinks it
appropriate for a wise person to grieve at all. Still we have to sort out
the difference within his new paradigm between an affected grief and
genuine loss-taking. That task defines much of the work of the
remainder of this chapter. I begin with a closer look, via Cicero, at
the philosophers critique of grief and then take up Augustines basic
critique of that critique; from there I examine Augustines confes-
sional reformulation of an unsettling passion. The broader issue,
extending into other chapters, concerns the value of the life that
makes a person liable to grief.
VIRTUE COMES TO GRIEF
Ciceronian plot
In mid-February of 45 B.C.E., Ciceros only daughter, Tullia, to
whom he was deeply attached, died at his country estate at Tusculum,
near Rome, owing to complications of childbirth; her child died
about a month thereafter. Cicero stayed away from Tusculum for
several months and effectively dropped out of public life, despite
the gentle urging of his longtime friend, Atticus, who wanted him to
put on a brave face and continue to meet his obligations as a leading
citizen. Aside from this being the general expectation of a vir optimus,
a great man, his friends advice was politically prudent: Julius Caesar
held power in Rome, and Ciceros one-time support of Pompey,
18
Caesars defeated rival, was, though forgiven, certainly not forgotten.
In his letters from that time of withdrawal, Cicero reassures Atticus
that he has not been wasting away but writing with great intent, turning
sorrow into contemplation. Most of Ciceros major philosophical
writings were indeed to follow in the wake of Tullias death, among
them a work of consolation, now lost. Cicero tells Atticus that he
was able, through self-consolation, to diminish the outward show of
his grieving (ep. 267, 12.28): The grief itself, he adds, I was not
able to lessen, nor would I want to, were I able.
Augustine knew of Ciceros Consolatio. He invokes the work in
City of God (civ. Dei 19.4) as the paradigm expression of the genre.
But his intent is not to praise Cicero as a writer; it is to underscore
the incapacity of even the best wrought words to take in, much less
away, the sum of human suffering. The Cicero of the letters, writing
to a close friend, might have been disposed to concede the point,
even adding that no one should have supposed otherwise. But in a
work styled as a series of philosophical conversations, written while
still in mournful seclusion at Tusculum and intended for a wider
audience, Cicero defends a more traditional conclusion. In book 3 of
Tusculan Disputations, the main speaker works to convince one of his
companions that wisdom is the cure for all manner of mental distress
(aegritudo), grief included. The wise person is, in the classic meaning
of the word, apatheticnot insensible or dead inside but free of the
kind of passion (Greek,
; Latin, perturbatio) that wrecks a persons

reasoned self-possession and gives reign to bad judgment.
To feel the force of Ciceros argument it is important to know
something about his theory of emotions. He lays out that theory,
broadly Stoic, in book 4 of Tusculans. Emotions have four basic
forms and two basic objects, he explains: desire (libido) and abandon
(laetitia) have as their object pleasure and its pursuit; fear (metus)
and distress (aegritudo) relate to pain and its avoidance. When I seek
a pleasure that moves me to abandon my good sense, I am in a state
of desire; when I shrink from a pain I assume will be self-rending,
I am in a state of fear. The Latin terms in the parentheses are all
terms of art for Cicero; they are meant specifically to designate
emotions in their primitive, untutored state, the assumption being
that emotions admit of refinement and even transformation. The
well-tempered psyche experiences resolve (voluntas) but not desire,
gladness (gaudium) but not abandon, reserve (cautio) but not fear.
19
It seems to me, writes Cicero (Tusc. 4.31.65), that all the theorizing
about emotion comes down to this: that emotions are all in our
power, that all of them express judgment, that all are voluntary. His
principal term for emotion, perturbatio animiliterally a mental
disturbance, already connotes the malady of those who neglect their
education and fall into bad habits of judgment (for which they have
only themselves to blame). Cicero will need a new word to designate
well-heeled feelings of resolve, gladness, and reserve. He calls them
constancies (constantiae; Tusc. 4.6.11 f.); more than rational emotions,
they are the very embodiments of reason.
As the one form of emotion that is essentially uneducable, distress
rates its own discussion. The word that Cicero uses for distress,
aegritudo, is usually not restricted to mental vexation but can also
mean, as Augustine points out while pondering this part of Cicero
(civ. Dei 14.7), bodily illness and physical torment. But Cicero is not
claiming that it is irrational for a person of wisdom to get sick or feel
pain. He is claiming that none of the assaults on mortal flesh need
ever become a reason for feeling distressed. There is no good reason
for mental distress of any kind, and as a master of reasons, a wise
person will not think or feel differently. Here is the key passage from
book 3 of Tusculans (Tusc. 3.34.8283):
All distress is far removed from the wise person, being that it is
empty, that it is a pointless experience, that it has its source not
in nature but in judgment, in opinion, in a certain call to grief
that comes whenever we resolve that grieving is called for. With
the wholly voluntary element removed, distress will be taken
away, the grievous partbut still the mind will feel a bite and
be contracted a bit.
Note the curious reference to an involuntary contraction of mind,
sometimes confused with distress proper, but on analysis very different.
Cicero was well aware of the debate between the Peripatetic and Stoic
schools of philosophy over whether a person of wisdom would ever be
completely beyond the reach of distressful emotions. The Peripatetics
thought not. They put some value on objects of desire that, once lost,
were nothing other than involuntary losses. Moral virtue was not in
this boat, but physical beauty and fitness, loved ones, and material
wealth were. In short, much of what many of us would consider
20
crucial to happiness counted for the Peripatetics as external goods
(bona externa), the loss of which would be in some way distressing.
The Stoics preferred to call such things preferable items (praeposita);
they could, like moral goods, elicit commitment, but the true sage
presumptively Stoicwould be able to dissent from the commitment
if the preferable were lost and, in retrospect, undo a preference. Just
imagine a Stoic Cicero, confronting the loss of Tullia. Like most
fathers, he naturally prefers not to survive his daughter, but having
survived her, he engages in self-therapy and comes to the conclusion
that her loss to him is not a loss to his virtue; he is still, as he was
when she lived, essentially himself. The involuntarily pain of loss that
precedes his conclusion and then survives it as an occasional physical
echo is not, from the Stoic point of view, an emotion; it is more like
a toothache or a cutsomething that hurts (and so causes the mind
to contract) but conveys no grief.
It is not clear from the quoted passage whether Cicero is siding
with one of the two schools over the other. Though usually keen to
find Latin equivalents for Greek philosophical terms, he does not
give a name to the involuntary contraction of the mind that a Greek
Stoic writing after Chrysippus, the great Stoic systematizer, would
have termed a pre-passion (
). So perhaps Cicero was not

intending that kind of conceptualization. In his compendium of
classical ethics, The Ends of Things Good and Bad, finished shortly
before he began Tusculans, he seems ready to follow the lead of his
old teacher, Antiochus of Ascalon, who considered the differences
between Peripatetics and Stoics on the matter of losable goods
(and attachment thereto) more verbal than real. What difference
does it make, Cicero asks, obviously impatient with Stoic novelty
(fin. 4.9.23), whether you call wealth, power, health goods (bona)
or preferred items (praeposita), when the one who calls them goods
gives them no more value than you who dub them preferred? But
despite the rhetorical nod to a Peripatetic ecumenism in ethics, where
virtue suffices for happiness while virtue with added value suffices
better, Cicero goes on to criticize Antiochus for inconsistency
(fin. 5.27.8182): how can a best life be made better? If virtue
suffices, then it suffices.
To speak of virtue as sufficient for happiness is to think of virtue
as the perfection of selfhood and not as one kind of good, albeit a
superior kind, among others. It is not possible to add to perfection
and get something better. Hence Cicero in Tusculans 3, still on the
21
topic of grief, feels free to advance the cause of self-love as it were a
truth of reason (Tusc. 3.29.73):
It is a lustrous thing and, if you look into it, a thing also right
and true that we should love as much as we love ourselves those
who claim our affections most. More than that is not doable.
In friendship it is not even desirable that my friend love me more
than himself or I him more than me. If such were the case, it would
be the disordering of life and all of its proper offices.
Think of those who face the prospect of their own deaths calmly but
become unhinged when facing the death of someone they love. What
some may see as a laudable loss of self-regard Cicero characterizes
above as a pathological inconsistency. If my virtue depends upon me,
then my deathwhich is mostly out of my controlis no threat
to my selfs perfection. Similarly the death of a loved one is no threat.
If I were to treat it as a threat, I would not be expressing a love greater
than my self-regard; I would be corrupting myself.
As far as I can tell, the quasi-Stoic philosophy that Cicero comes
to profess does not require him to deny his grief. He is not being
inconsistent when he confides to Atticus that he wants to live with
the loss of his daughter and not be done with it. He clearly considers
his pain a memorial to something of value. But what good has been
lost? His philosophy will not let him say that Tullia was his virtue.
The false belief whose ouster would have left him pained but still in
possession of himself is presumably this: that one person can be
materially implicated in the virtues of anotheras if a root power of
self-determination were made subject through mutual affection to
the meeting and parting of bodies. Cicero, with his virtues intact,
takes in an undefined loss. His willingness to call that loss the loss of
a good leaves his philosophy of grief caught between an impulse to
trivialize (the loss, not being a loss of virtue, is nothing at all) and a
disposition to despair (the loss, not being a loss of virtue, is beyond
measure). It takes an Augustine to want to focus philosophy there, on
the agony of virtue itself.
Augustinian dnouement
Augustine credits his philosophical awakening to Cicero. He tells
us in the Confessions (conf. 3.4.7) that he was only 18 when he read
22
Ciceros Hortensius and that the book changed his affect (affectum).
He started to look for wisdom from life and not for the vanities that
tend to please most other passionate, intellectually gifted, sexually
driven, politically ambitious young men who are experiencing
big-city life for the first time. His new affect had its work cut out
for it. Augustine had left his native Thagaste, an inland town in the
farm-belt of Roman North Africa for Carthage, the Punic Rome.
Looking back he describes his adolescent entry into bigger theater in
memorable terms (conf. 3.1.1): I came to Carthage, and a frying pan
of unsavory loves sizzled around me on all sides. I didnt have love
yet; I was in love with love, and from a more hidden place of need
I hated the less needy me. Not exactly a sentiment that rushes a
person toward Stoic resolve, Peripatetic virtue, or some judiciously
Ciceronian amalgam of the two. Augustines personal choice of a
philosophy at the timeone that would see him through his
twentieswas that of Manicheism, the religious inspiration of the
third-century Mesopotamian prophet Mani, who lived and died
under Persian rule.
Manicheism is best known for its dualistic cosmology of conflicting
forces, light and darktwo kingdoms with a contested border. The
dark side, vice-driven and grossly material, succumbs to envy and
decides to invade the light, consequently trapping light in matter and
giving birth to the debased material order of our current human
experience. The kingdom of the light responds in various ways, most
notably by sending along a Jesus who, unlike his material imperson-
ator, can remind beings forgetful of their luminescence whence they
come. Awakened to this knowledge, the Manichean Elect work with
less self-knowing but still promising assistantsthe Hearersto
disencumber light from matter. The work can take on a peculiarly
material cast, as sainted luminaries obsess over their diets. No meat-
eating for saints, but also no eating of any vegetables they have picked
for themselves. Augustine, a former Hearer of the sect, recalls having
persuaded himself of some manifestly bizarre beliefs (conf. 3.10.18):
that a fig weeps when picked and that its mother, the fig-tree, weeps
tears of milk; that if some saint were to eat the fig, the picking being
someone elses sin, not his, he would digest it and breathe out angels,
or better yet, retch up God-bits in a belched prayer.
Never popular with Roman stalwarts, who viewed its association
with Persia (the decadent East) with suspicion and contempt,
Manicheism was in the eyes of many Catholic Christians an arch-heresy.
23
It was, from the beginnings of its missionary reach into Roman
territories in the late third century, a secretive movement, existing in
tight groups on the margins of society. As a newly installed bishop,
writing in part to reassure his readers of his ex-Manichean standing,
Augustine had reason enough to paint his former years of allegiance
as a time of temporary insanity, when he had come to believe in the
grotesque. He encourages his readers to forget that the distance
between Cicero and Mani was once remarkably short in his mind and
that his turn to the religion of Mani was motivated by his desire,
however immature, to be less worldly and live more philosophically.
His brief description in the Confessions of his newly changed affect is
telling, but it stops short, I think, of being explicitly self-revealing.
What he tells us is that Cicero opened him to a new love, to the
wisdom that is the property of no school or sect, but is, as divine,
indivisible and eternally beautiful. He assumed that Christthe
name his mother had taught him from his earliest days to revere
was the divine name for this wisdom, and so he naturally turned his
attention to the Gospels and the rest of scripture, looking there for
something resonantly Ciceronian. And here is where his affection for
Ciceros style of writing got him into trouble. He was put off by the
apparent crudeness of the Bibleespecially the older portions, where
a jealous divinity, having body parts, seemed to countenance such
things as polygamy and tribal warfare. It was my self-inflation, he
concedes, looking back (conf. 3.5.9), that was refusing the Bibles
manner, and my insight never reached down to its inner depths.
While still surface-minded, he eagerly wanted to believe the Manichees
when they assured him that Manis revelation, tied to the divinity in
Christ but divorced from childish anthropomorphisms and worldly
values, rested on no other authority than truth itself (conf. 3.6.10):
They used to say, truth!, truth!, and they said many things to me
about the truth, but the truth was never in them.
It would be more than a decade before Augustine would meet
and spend extended time with Faustus of Milevis, a Manichee with
a reputation for big learning. When that meeting finally took place, it
marked the beginning of the end of Augustines Manichean sojourn
(conf. 5.6.11 f.). He ended up liking Faustus and even admired him
for how open and unassuming he could be about the limits of his
learning. But those limits surprised Augustine. Faustus had a
conventional but hardly deep knowledge of the liberal artssome
Cicero and Seneca, a smattering of poetry, good rhetorical skills.
24
It is indeed possible for someone ignorant of the arts to have a grip
on spiritual truth, but not, Augustine wryly notes (conf. 5.7.12), if
that person is a Manichee. When Augustine took his leave of both
Faustus and Carthage and headed, at age 30, for Rome and new
philosophical frontiers, the impression we are left with as readers
of the Confessions is that he was leaving most of his Manichean
craziness behind him. The assumption that had once given him leave
to move from Cicero to Mani had become weak and untrustworthy.
No longer could he confidently assume that soul-satisfying wisdom
is the fruit of intellectual sophistication, enthusiastically culled from
any available source. He arrives in Rome still a well-reputed professor
of rhetoric, but bone-tired of his all-too-worldly success. For a while
he falls in with Academic skeptics, philosophers who could boast
Cicero as their distinguished forebear, but who, in Augustines under-
standing of them at the time, had wisely given up on wisdom: I began
to think then, he writes (conf. 5.10.19), that the philosophers known
as Academics were shrewder than the restbecause they took account
of the doubtfulness of everything and determined that nothing about
the truth is humanly graspable.
Augustines path from Cicero to Mani and through Manicheism
finally dead-ends for him in a debilitated skepticism: the eclectic
openness to wisdom, urged in the Hortensius, has become virtually
indistinguishable in his mind from a disposition not to commit
wholeheartedly to anything. Along the way Augustine has had his
Carthage years of luxuriant exoticism, when he seemed willing to
believe just about anything provided that the belief was coiffed in the
rhetoric of truth-seeking. The moral to take from all this may well be
that the desire for wisdom, when made to serve some combination of
curiosity and a need to appear persuasive, is apt to make the most
talented of persuaders, like the rhetorical Augustine, irresponsible
and even a touch stupid. For what, after all, is the Manichean postulate
of a dark and foreign soul, crudely encasing the light that one is, but
a fanciful invitation to skip the moral cultivation part of becoming
enlightened? A soul of light is, by its very nature, already enlightened;
all the dark stuff that binds its awareness is just an alien impediment to
its self-knowledgea problem that a better diet and a less materially
invested lifestyle are presumably able to solve. In his writings directed
specifically against the Manichees, Augustine will be tireless in his
insistence that they have confused bad habits with an evil nature. Or as
he explains in Two Souls: An Anti-Manichean Work (duab. an. 13.19):
25
So it happens that when we strive for better things and run up
against the habits of flesh and sin that begin in some way to make
trouble for us, some fools suspect, out of the dumbest of superstitions,
that there is a kind of soul not of God. There is no naturally bad
soul, Augustine has come to see; there is only the good soul that has
hobbled itself through a history of bad judgment.
But despite Augustines inclination in his anti-Manichean writings
to make moralism into the alternative to Manichean dualisman
inclination that much delighted his eventual Pelagian criticsit is
arguable that he was never moving from an exotic form of moral
indigence to an unsentimental, chiefly Roman, form of self-sculpting
(and then back again, if his Pelagian critics are to be believed). In his
mind there was just not a profound difference and certainly no
incompatibility between his rejection of Manichean psychology
(where sin gets misconceived) and his reaction against Pelagian
moralism (where grace is missed). They were simply the two different
sides of his single-minded philosophy of sin and grace. For it is one
thing, he writes (retr. 1.9.2.), to wonder where evil gets its start,
another thing to wonder where the return to innocence begins, or the
attainment of something greater.
Admittedly the compatibility, much less the complicity, of his two
critiquesone of Manichean vice, the other of Pelagian virtuehas
been far from obvious to his readers, the sympathetic ones included,
who have used the Reconsiderations, his late-in-life review of his
major works, as their guide. In his review of Two Souls, for example,
he reconsiders the definition of sin that the Pelagian bishop, Julian
of Eclanum, once described as a piece of gold in a dung-heap
(retr. 1.15.4; cf. c. Jul. imp. 1:44): Sin is the will to retain or acquire
what justice forbidsan injustice from which one is free to abstain.
Augustine holds to the basic truth of his definition but restricts
freedom to abstain from injustice to Adam, who sins anyway. Adams
mortal heirsall of humanity save Jesus and perhaps Maryare
born predisposed to injustice and can be expected to live out this
predisposition in fact, barring infant death or divine intervention.
Little wonder that Augustines sense of sins penalty (poena peccati)
could evoke a Manichean-like fear of the flesh.
I am nevertheless still inclined to believe that the deeper truth lies
with the complicity of his critiques. In the manner of his break from
the Manichees, Augustine does indeed bar his own door to a Pelagian
alternative. To see this, we need to consider more thoroughly what
26
Augustine comes close to revealing in the Confessions: that his turn
to the religion of Mani was his answer to Ciceros call to the philo-
sophical life.
The Hortensius was a work of Ciceros last years, written after
the death of his daughter and as part of his self-prescribed literary
therapy. Although only fragments of the exhortation have survived
(in the form of quoted material), it is reasonable to assume that
Cicero underscored there, as elsewhere, the cardinal offering of philo-
sophy: that the person of a truly philosophical disposition can learn
to weather adversity and apparent defeat and remain wholly intent
on serving the highest good. Being himself a lover of republican values
and a great believer in the promise of politics, Cicero doubtless would
have found little to love in the apolitical asceticism of the Manichees,
whose kingdom of light was not of this world. Still Cicero was not
unfamiliar with extreme forms of the desire to dematerialize value
nor was he entirely unsympathetic to the impulse.
I mean by the dematerialization of value the perfect dissociation
of a good from its material bearer. If the material bearer is lost, the
good remains or may even be said to be liberated. Ciceros Stoics
practice one kind of dematerialization when they refuse to call goods
that can be involuntarily lost good (bonum); they are preferred until
they are lostthen they are viewed, in retrospect, to have been of
indifferent value. (And so the Stoic: I lost my friend to death, but
not the virtue I brought to that friendship; it is the virtue that I must
continue to value and not the perishable thing whose presence I once
preferred and can no longer have.) The Manichees, whom Cicero
never knew as such, practice another kind of dematerialization:
because they consider materiality a foreign constraint on goodness,
they have to insist even more emphatically than do the Stoics that no
material loss is ever really a loss. It is, on the contrary, victory over an
enemy. (And now the Manichee: I havent lost my friend to death;
the realm of darkness has lost one of its kidnapped lights. Years
before his so-called death, my friend recognized his true nature in this
lifereally this death of a lifeand lightened his tread: no children for
him, no amassment of wealth and property, no violent consumption
of flesh. He left behind tracks that only children of the light can
follow.) Cicero clearly disliked overzealous and convoluted attempts
to deny loss in life, but he had his own proclivity to dematerialize
virtueeven as he held tight to a private grief.
27
My point is this. When Augustine disavows his Manicheism, he
stops looking to isolate his self-formation from all the possible
sources of grief in his life. The Manichean mode of this strategy
extreme and probably impossible to pull off in practiceis to darken
matter and live as if the external world were constituted by a loss of
light and lightness, a loss of self. This leaves the remainder self, the
soul of light, surrounded on all sides by a grief it has resolved not to
feel. The other extreme of a dissociative ethicthat of Stoic placidity
(
)looks for reasonableness from the natural order and thus

stands a pole apart from Manichean world-weariness. Every Stoic
sage feels at home in the world, while every Manichean saint feels
at home somewhere else. Before he knew much about grief-denying
philosophy and its antipodal forms, Augustine was looking for the
name of Christ in a philosophy: he found it first in Manicheism.
It was a long association for him, but as strange as he made it sound,
the real question is why the ex-Manichee failed to find in Pelagian
Christianity the sage-like Christ of his hopes. Pelagians saw them-
selves as the reasonable alternative to Manichean extremism.
Here I will make use of the analogy between Stoic and Manichean
asceticism as a wedge into Augustines way of thinking. Obviously
those two forms of the ascetic life speak to very different notions
of the human condition, and from the standpoint of our own day,
Manicheism is too wildly speculative and under-argued to rate as
a philosophy, whereas Stoicism has classical credentials and an
undisputed place of importance in the subsequent evolution of the
philosophical canon. But the prejudice against the very notion of
a Manichean philosophy will not help us a whit to understand
Augustine, who would have seen in the happiness-bestowing virtues
of the Stoics and the gnostic fantasies of the Manichees two forms of
the same philosophically seductive idea: that wisdom is the privilege
of secured selfhood. A self is insecure if it has reason to fear the
involuntarily loss of whatever good gives it its ideal self-definition.
If I am a Manichean saint, then I get beyond fear of self-loss when
I remember that I am already, in my essence, the good that I seek
(though there is still that delicate matter of rejoining my light to the
greater light); if I am a Stoic sage, then I am beyond such fear once
I identify my good with the perfect good of the whole cosmos, of
which I am an integral part (though there is still that delicate matter
of my particular preferences). When Cicero criticizes Stoics for being
28
disingenuous about their preferences, he is suggesting a fairly modest
revision of their idealized cosmos: the world, such as it is, supports
virtue, but virtue is not all there is to happiness. A truly ideal order
would fully support both virtue and the preferences of virtuous
peoplebasically a Pelagian heaven. If we are looking for some sign
of a Pelagian mind-set in the anti-Manichean Augustine, we may
reasonably expect to find it in his post-Manichean affinity for Cicero
and Ciceros critique of Stoicism (Pelagius being to Mani roughly
what Cicero is to a Stoic). By the same token, lack of affinity would
tell us something about the depths of Augustines animus against
anything resembling the classical ideal of virtue.
In book 9 of City of God, in a section devoted to the passions of a
person of wisdom (civ. Dei 9.4), he sounds very Ciceronian at first.
He divides philosophical opinion on the passions into two schools
Stoic and Peripateticand then endorses Ciceros judgment about
the difference between them: that it does not matter whether involun-
tarily lost goods are called goods or something else. Involuntary
loss will be involuntarily felt, regardless of a persons level or form of
wisdom. But Ciceros motive for assimilating the Stoic to the Peripatetic
point of view was to underscore the overriding importance of virtue
to a philosophers self-definition. Attachment to other kinds of
goods has some register in the emotions, but never, says Cicero, as the
kind of distress that ruins the integrity of virtue and sows division
into a sages self-understanding. Augustine, for his part, is ready to
acquiesce to a tattered virtue.
For his illustration of the Ciceronian point of view, he chooses an
anecdote from Attic Nights, the miscellany of Aulus Gellius, an
enthusiast of Greek philosophy who lived in the second century.
Gellius describes having been on board ship with a famous Stoic
who turned pale with fright when a powerful storm started to rage.
After the seas had calmed, Gellius asked the sage why he blanched
at the prospect of losing what was not his choice to retain. The
Stoic explained that everyone is subject to involuntary impressions
(
) of imminent loss or gainthese come too quickly to be

helped; the person of wisdom, however, knows to consent only to
what is truly of value in any given situation: the opportunities for
virtue. If the idea here is that the Stoic was able to externalize his
fear and call it, in retrospect, a meaningless bodily agitation, then
Augustine is clearly not buying (civ. Dei 9.4): Surely if the philoso-
pher in the story were giving no weight to what he felt he was about
29
to lose by shipwreckhis life and limbhe would not have shrunk
so from the danger as to pale in fear. Augustine accepts the Stoic
idea that emotions, being deposits of resolve (voluntates; civ. Dei 14.6),
always convey judgments of value, but he denies that Stoics or any-
one else can lay claim to a consistent mode of appraisal. No form of
revisionism, however benign, can unify judgment. And so where
Cicero reaffirms virtues integrity in the face of involuntary bodily
agitations (call them what you will), Augustine finds a perpetually
divided house. Philosophers, just like the rest of us fools, experience
value in contradictory ways.
Augustine does seem to entertain the idea that the ideal of Stoic
placidity and unity of resolve may be realized, if not here, then in the
life to come (civ. Dei 14.9). Certainly there will be no cause for grief,
he thinks, when the soul is fully basking in the love of God, and even
if love may not cast out fear in all of its forms (cf. 1 Jn. 4:18),
the beatified fear that remains is no servile or mundane thing. But
Augustine is offering no more than a tentative speculation about the
transformation of all the basic emotions, save grief, into beatified
forms, and in any case his eschatological frame of mind tends to
obscure the extent of his divergence from all the various forms of
moralism that were known to him: Ciceronian, Pelagian, Stoic, and
Manichean. The real issue for him is not whether a saint struggling
in the earthly vale is Stoicisms sage in the afterlife. It is whether a
person of perfect wisdom, while still in his life, ever has reason to
grieve. On that issue, Augustine takes his stand with the Gospels.
Jesus wept for his friend Lazarus (Jn. 11:38), and in his garden agony
at Gethsemane, he nearly grieved himself to death (Matt. 26:38).
Augustine has no doubt about how such ascriptions of feeling to
Jesuswisdom incarnateare to be read. They are literally true
(civ. Dei 14.9): The human emotion was not fake in him who had a
genuine human body and a genuine human mind.
There is nevertheless a difference between Christs experience of
humanity and the humanity that the rest of us experienceand it is
a difference that counts when it comes to grief. Augustine notes that
when we give into grief, we often do so involuntarily, even when we
know that we would be grieving out of love (caritas) and not some
blameworthy motive (cupiditas). He surmises from this that grief and
other involuntary passions have their origin in the infirmity of our
human condition: but it is not like this, he adds (civ. Dei 14.9), for
the Lord Jesus, whose infirmity originated from his power.
30
Although the contrast is doubtless important, it is not clear at first
what Augustine intends by it. Does he mean that Christs grief
expresses his divine self-control and not his human vulnerability?
Unlikely. Grief that is wholly willed is affected and therefore fake.
Christs grief, Augustine assures us, is not fake. What about the
rest of us? If we resist surrendering to even a charitable grief, is the
implication that we prefer to will rather than to feel? The moralist in
me is inclined to answer, yes, but so what? It is Augustine himself
who suggests to me that I ought to be grieving mostly for sinmainly
my own, but also that of others, whom I am learning to love as myself.
Grieving for sin is what Christ, as both the sinless human being
and the God of love, does more authentically than anyone else.
So perhaps the difference between his grief and ours may be put
this way: he defines the meaning of our grief; we do not define the
meaning of his. Not being Christ, I can always count on having more
moral work to do before I feel the right grief. And yet my inner
moralist, still annoyed, persists: Why isnt exhortation rather than
grief the better response to sin in others, repentance rather than grief
the better response to sin in myself ?
The answer to this, if there is one, is that grief over sin is less a
response to moral failure than a recognition of loss. If I take my
lessons from Augustine, who is careful to single out grief (tristitia)
from other kinds of distress (dolor, aegritudo), I will learn that I lose
others more profoundly to sin than I do to death. I will also learn
that I have no claim to this awareness and, in a sense, no right to it,
while lost to sin of my own. Most profoundly I will learn that a human
teacher, even as good a one as Augustine, is not the real teacher here;
for either the lesson of grief and its remedy is confessionalintimately
a matter of give-and-take between God and soulor ethics is, from
an Augustinian point of view, an absent-hearted and empty moralism.
I turn now to confessional matters.
THE MATERIALIZATION OF LOSS
Trappings of woe
Augustine is remarkably preoccupied in the Confessions, the early
books especially, with the authenticity of his feelings. In book 1 he
recalls his boyhood love of Virgils Aeneid and faults himself for
having wept back then for Dido, the anti-hero who kills herself when
31
heroic Aeneas, her lover and (in her mind) husband, favors his divine
calling to found a new Troy in Rome over a less fated life with her in
Carthage: What then is more pitiable, he asks (conf. 1.13.21), than
a pitiful man with no self-pity? He weeps for Dido, dead from loving
Aeneas, but not for himself, dead from not loving you, God, light of
my heart, bread of my souls mouth, power that weds my mind to my
thoughts inmost chamber (sinus). The implication of Augustines
self-indictmentcast curiously as a kind of autopsyis that he was
grieving for the wrong person, albeit a fictional person. In book 3,
where he looks back at his Carthage years, he is more generally
concerned by how theatrical he was becoming on the inside, in the
sinuses of his soul (conf. 3.2.2): I was captivated by stage plays, full of
images of my own miseries, fuel to my fire. He wonders why anyone,
himself included, would choose to be entertained by staged suffering
and death. There must be some pleasure at stake, he surmises, but a
pleasure that is peculiarly indebted to pain: If human calamities,
whether historical (antiquae) or unreal (falsae), are acted out in such
a way that the spectator is not pained, he storms out of the theatre
disgusted and disapproving; but if pained, he stays transfixed and
enjoys his weeping.
If an affect is false to its core, then its transfer from one object to
anothersay from Dido to Godis not going to improve matters.
Remember that Augustine holds to the theory that emotions reflect
judgments, though often not very deliberate ones, about what is
worth having or avoiding. On this score he seems more consistent
than the Stoics, who hold to the same theory but allow their sages the
out of dispensable pre-passions or impressions. A pleasure or pain,
experienced (let us stipulate) as a pure sensation, unfiltered through
belief, would not count for Augustine as an emotion or even an
impression of an emotion. The Stoic who accidentally stubs his toe is
not (necessarily) having an emotion, but the one who involuntarily
fears for his life because of some perceived danger most certainly is.
Where the mind is stirred, emotion too must be presentemotion
being by definition a stirring up or disturbing of the mind (perturbatio
animi). In keeping with this definition, it is one order of distress to have
your body cut, battered, and burned; quite another to have your mind
keyed to insecurity, loss, and despair. Experience of the first order of
distress can of course give rise, in a thinking being, to experience of the
second (pains being doubly distressing at times), but the distinction of
orders is still workable and important. When Augustine is pained by
32
tragic theater, it has to be because the spectacle somehow evokes his
belief that he has irrevocably lost something or someone of considerable
value to him. I say evoke and not cause because it is not the death of
the fictional character that is causing him the pain. He knows that
Virgils Dido is not a real person and that unreal people do not die.
We can assume, then, that in so far as he feels sorrow over Dido, the
fiction of her death must be evoking in him the memory of a real
losssome displaced object of grief.
But now we come to the heart of Augustines problem, the reason
why he cannot trust his love of tragic mimesis. Well-directed sympathy
is healthy, the sign of a virtuous intelligence; sympathy for fictional
characters is a corruption of sympathy and not just a shadow or a
copy of the normal affect. Augustine recalls his old delight in the
delight of illicit lovers on stage, his agreeable sorrow for their sorrow.
Today, he notes (conf. 3.2.3), I have more compassion for a person
who delights in a shameful act than I do for someone who finds
it hard to be denied a hobbled pleasure or miss out on a pathetic
felicity. His compassion for the one who puts on the show of vice is
now greater, in other words, than for the one who wants to watch but
misses out. Is he still talking about theater? It is not so easy to tell.
Clearly he is marking his distance from a compassion (misericordia)
that is more virtual than realthe sort that wants to have something
to feel bad about. What he now feels for an agent of tragedy or an
actor of vice is no longer so blatantly like that. His compassion has
become more authentic (verior), and by this he means that the
sorrow in it does not delight (conf. 3.2.3: non in ea delectat dolor).
The reference to non-delighting sorrowpure griefis the key to
Augustines apparent lack of interest in the distinction between
theater and real life. No doubt there is a terribly real difference
between, say, a staged rape and a real one, between the actor who
pretends to delight in rape and the psychopath who actually does.
But none of this would be news to Augustine, who was as capable as
you or I at making the relevant distinction. He was also well aware of
the argument that staged immoralities either desensitize their viewers
to real immoralities or (worse) actively encourage immoralities by
glorifying them. He advances this argument himself, in passing in the
Confessions (conf. 1.16.25) and at much greater length in City of God
(civ. Dei 2.8 f., 4.26, 6.6 f.), where he faults Homer and other pagan
writers for inventing gods who misbehave and give bad behavior a
good name. But the moralistic critique of fictionalized affects and
33
actions is the superficial one in Augustine; it suggests too easily that
bad theater makes for bad peoplea critique less of theater than of
the stupidity of human desire and our love of imitation.
The deeper truth for Augustine is that we bring to any tragic
spectacle a disposition to weaken the distinction between suffering
people and fictions. It can take extraordinary skillsometimes on the
order of a Virgil or a Homerto invent the spectacle that supplies
our disposition with the verisimilitude it craves. If Dido becomes
for us too grievable a character, a fiction no more, then we have a
compelling motive to set Virgil aside: for no one willingly embraces a
poet who evokes too well the grief that delights not. No human poet,
however, can literally make the word flesh and subject the lover of an
incarnate life to real bereavement; only God can do that. There is no
danger, then, that we can be absolutely deceived by a poets finite
powers of verisimilitude, even when that poet is as prodigious as a
Virgil. It is clearly possible for us, on the other hand, not to be taken
in at all. Fictions that are transparent are notoriously uncompelling;
they disappoint. What we want is neither a life confined to our mun-
dane selves nor a life removed entirely from our familiar affections;
we want to be both within and outside of ourselves at once, like some
spectator to a riveting drama. Practitioners of the dramatic arts
rhetoric includedmay choose to exploit this want of ours, but they
do not invent the disposition that underwrites it. If the disposition is
corrupt, the corruption lies in the spectating. That is the part, Augustine
warns us, that deserves less of our compassion.
In a remarkable stretch of the Confessions (conf. 4.4.7 to 4.7.12),
one that is ostensibly Augustines memorial to a childhood friend of
his who dies of fever (a friend he never names), he recounts for us a
grief that is as theatrical as it is intense. To say that his grief was
theatrical is not to suggest that he was putting on a show of grief,
that he felt little of nothing of grief within himself, that he was, all
told, only acting. On the contrary, Augustine concedes from his
confessional point of view that he was overwhelmed at the time by
his friends death and profoundly disoriented (conf. 4.4.9):
My heart was wholly in griefs shade, and death was whatever
I looked at. My native land was a punishment to me; my fathers
house a strange and luckless place. The things I had shared with my
friend turned and tortured me cruelly in his absence. My eyes kept
seeking him out everywhere, and he was gone. I hated everything
34
because nothing had him; nor could anything still say to me,
look, he is on his way, as when he was alive and just away. I had
become a great question to myself.
If there is an element of theater in all this grieving, it comes in the
form of Augustines fascination with his own great question, the
question of himself. There is nothing plainly wrong with turning
ones life into a question; such a turn is arguably the beginning of all
the philosophical virtues. But Augustines turn to his lifes great
question is supposed to be the offering of his grief. Having some
sense of the good he has lost with the loss of his friend, he lives on to
wonder what good yet remains to hima great question to be sure.
Its framing presupposes, however, that Augustines sorrow over his
friends death is quite unlike his grief for Dido. The sorrow must be
without the element of delight in loss, and the friend must be real
to him, not a fiction. In fact Augustine gives us good reason to think
that the framing of his great question was still that of tragic spectacle.
But because he wants us to notice the theatricality of his grief and be
unmoved by it, his confessional offering is actually a form of anti-tragic
theater. If we can begin to notice how his confession works against the
seduction of tragic mimesis, we may be less tempted to sympathize
with his grief and more likely to feel for his sin.
The hard part will be to feel for his sin. Augustine often speaks
as if it were obvious what it means to grieve for a persons moral
stupidities and misbegotten affections, but the idea of that kind of
grief can easily devolve into a contemptuous pity. It speaks like this:
Really too bad for the wretch so given to vice, so lacking in moral
backbone, so clueless about what is of real value in lifeI feel sorry
for him. Although sentiment of that sort is far from Augustines core
idea of what is grievable about sin, it will take some unearthing to get
to the difference. The need for digging has partly to do with the depth
of his psychological insights into sin and grief, but more directly it has
to do with just how diverting the feeling of contempt can be. There
is something hard to resist about the spectacle of someone elses
self-defeat; perhaps it conveys to us the hope that even on the way
to hell something in us is still in charge. If so, then self-contempt
is not going to be less of a lure for a self desperate for self-mastery
than contempt of others; it is going to be the mother of that other
contempt. Imagine Augustine being able to cast the two parts of his
time-fractured self into a perfectly contained scene: his confessing
35
self looks down at his past self, knowing it to be self-defeated, while
his past self, still imagining itself a victim, looks for consolation. The
knowingness of the confessional self is what turns the scene of an old
grief into tragic theater. To leave the theater, Augustine will have to
resist self-contempt as best he can and remain open in his confession
to an uncharted grief. He hints at that grief, lying quietly beneath the
tumult of his distress, when he writes (conf. 4.6.11): I was miserable,
as miserable as any soul defeated by its friendship with mortal things;
the loss of these things lacerates the soul, and then it feels the misery
by which it was miserable even before taking its losses.
The prior misery to which Augustine alludes is the misery of mor-
tality itself, but his words suggest something more than a generalized
lament over the mortal condition; they gesture to an original grief,
echoed in subsequent griefs, but never fully present thereand so,
it would seem, a grief impossible to mourn. Consider: I can, as a
mortal being, fear my own death, but I am never in a position to
mourn myself; only in my imagination am I at my own funeral. The
closest I come to mourning myself is feeling the loss of someone
who has entered into my self-definition; I lose a portion of myself,
psychologically speaking, when that person is lost to me. In his
confession of grief, Augustine adds two thoughts to this brief sketch
of my mortal self-awareness. One is that my fear of my own death
gives me an incentive not to surrender significant pieces of my self-
definition to others (presuming, of course, that I have a choice here);
the other is that the loss of a loved one reminds me not of my own
death (there is still nothing to remember here) but of my souls prior
separation from Goda grief that is written into the code of my
mortal flesh. The first thought is easier to take in, and so lets begin
with that one.
By the time Augustine writes the Confessions, he will have lost his
father, his mother, his son and only child, Adeodatus, and a longtime
friend and confidant, Nebridius. And yet the grief he decides to
showcase there is for a man whom he hesitates to remember as a
friend (conf. 4.4.7): He was not my friend then, and yet when he did
become one, it was not really a true friendshipfor no friendship is
true unless the love poured into our hearts by way of your holy spirit,
a gift to us, adds glue to the clinging. Augustine refers to the time
when he and this unnamed friend (for lack of a better term) were
boys together in Thagaste. They werent so close then, but when
Augustine returns to his hometown from his first few years in Carthage,
36
the two reconnect and the affection between them sets off on its short
but apparently very sweet run (conf. 4.4.7): You took the man away
from this life when scarcely a year had gone by in my friendship, a
thing sweet to me above all the sweetness of that life of mine. When
the grief comes, it finds Augustine anxious and self-preoccupied. He
recalls having had a greater attachment to his wounded self than to
his dead friend (conf. 4.6.11): For although I wanted my wretched
life to change, I was more unwilling to lose it than lose him, and
I dont know whether I would have traded my life for his, as in the
story (if not made-up) of Orestes and Pylades, who were willing to
die at the same time, each for the other, it being worse than death for
them not to live together. He wonders why his grief should have
focused him so much on his own death, and for a brief few sentences,
he lapses into a false sentimentality. Perhaps he and his friend were
two halves of a single soul; with one half gone, Augustine clung to
the othernot wishing the whole of his friend to die. This will seem
to him, in retrospect, a light-weight aside in an otherwise heavy
confession (retr. 2.6.2).
Elsewhere in book 4 he makes it clear that he had very little of his
self-definition invested in his friend, certainly far less than half. Around
the time of their friendship, Augustine was in the habit of making his
close friends into Manichees, this friend being no exception. When
his friend lapsed into feverish dementia and was baptized unawares
(presumably at the request of his family), Augustine confidently
believed that his friend would wake up his old self and be glad to
have his near-death baptism mocked as senseless. As it turns out, his
friend wasnt so glad. He was horrified at me, Augustine recalls
(conf. 4.4.8), as if I were his enemy, and with an astonishing and
sudden sense of independence, he warned me that if I wanted to be his
friend, I would have to stop saying such things to him. Augustines
resolve in the face of his friends unexpected defiance was to wait for
a better time to reassert his influence, but that time never comes. His
friend dies days later, while Augustine is away (conf. 4.4.8): He was
snatched away from my dementia, so that he might be safe with you
and a consolation for me. For the confessing Augustine, it was
dementia more culpable than a fever that had once made him plot his
friends subversion. But what the confessing Augustine and his
unconfessed former self both seem to agree on is this: with the time
and the material before him, Augustine was able to shape his friend
like so much clayI could do what I wanted with him (conf. 4.4.8).
37
Augustines self-portraiture in book 4 of the Confessions is design-
edly narcissistic, and that includes his light-weight aside, when he
reduces his friends death to a moment in his own dying. The only
quality of his friend that seems irreducible to Augustines ego is
his friends surprising resistance to having his reverences further
manipulated. But this is certainly not the quality that the master
persuader, in all his noisy mourning, misses. He misses his friends
pliability, and left without a suitable study for his self-image, he leaves
Thagaste and returns to Carthage, where he will find other friends,
other studies. His old delights return to him over time, and they are
attended, he reports, not by different sorrows but by different
causes of sorrow (conf. 4.8.13). The characters change, but the story
remains depressingly the samea long story, he confesses, and
a big lie. The story has him delighting and grieving over friends
who move in and out of his life without significantly changing his
self-definition; the lie resides in his attempt to define himself in terms
of a corrupted reverence. Augustine has taken from the Manichees a
license to disown his inner deformities and revere himself as a piece
of God. He expects his friendsthe other pieces of Godto confirm
for him (endlessly) the validity of the license.
But it is not Manicheism that is Augustines fundamental problem
in book 4. There are plenty of bad ways to construe the difference
between God and soul, self and other, mind and body and no right way
that puts a person in command of those differences. The narcissism to
which Augustine is confessing is not the product of an ideology,
Manichean or otherwise; it is the default form that reverence takes
whenever reverence is made to serve fear. If it were truly possible to
live narcissisticallythat is, if the reverence in it were not corrupted
but just differentit would be possible to reduce all grief to fear
of death. Augustine shows us the way. If I grieve for a loved one, then
I grieve, narcissistically speaking, solely for a part of myself. I may
try to convince myself that I have lost only a self-image and not my
true self, closer to me than any image, but this is just the other move
in the logic of narcissismthe logic of an all-or-nothing selfhood.
For either I exist absolutely (and so play the part of Narcissus), or
I fade into nothingness (and play Echo). But Augustine, remember, is
confessing to narcissism, and no one who is able to confessto speak
with anotheris constitutionally a narcissist. We should not be so
quick, then, to conclude from the theatricality of his grief that he
was feeling no grief at all, but only fear of death. The fundamental
38
oneness or unity of love is not for him a narcissists conceit; it is the
divine space in which love is offered and returned (ex pluribus unum):
It is this unity, he explains (conf. 4.9.14), that is loved in friendsso
much so that we feel guilty if we dont love back the one loving us or
if we dont love the one loving us back, looking for nothing more
physical in response than signs of good will.
But now we have arrived at the deepest current of Augustines
confession of grief: his belated recognition of his original capacity
for loveLate I loved you, beauty so old and so new; I loved you
late (conf. 10.27.38).
A grievable God
In Lukes parable of the prodigal son (Lk. 15:1132), the younger of
two sons leaves his fathers house with his share of the property and
travels to a distant country, where he quickly squanders his inheri-
tance through dissolute living. When famine reduces his adopted
land to a place of terrible need, the younger sonnow with only
need to his namehires himself out to feed someone elses pigs,
whose slop he finds himself coveting. Humiliated and desperate, he
resolves to return to his fathers house, even if that means, as he
assumes it must, that he will live out his life as a slave there. His father
has other ideas. He sees his son returning from a far distance and,
filled with compassion, rushes out to meet him. He will have none of
his sons offer to exchange sonship for servitude. Instead the father
acts as if his son were back from the dead; he arranges for a great
celebration in his honorgreater than the stay-at-home older boy
had ever seen or experienced.
Augustine interjects himself into his own version of the prodigals
tale in book 2 of the Confessions. The set-up is simple enough.
We are back in Thagaste. Augustine is an adolescent, about 16, and
he and some other adolescent boyshis usual gangdecide one
night to steal some pears from a tree near his familys vineyard. They
carry off armfuls of illicit fruit and discard most of what they take as
so much pig-food. But their aim was never to savor the pears that
were, in any case, not especially beautiful or tasty. The whole appeal
of the exercise, Augustine recalls, was the thrill of transgression itself
(conf. 2.4.9): Even if we ate a few, what was pleasing to us was all the
sameto do what was not allowed.
39
There are already some obvious divergences from Lukes parable.
Augustine is not wasting an inheritance he has been freely given; he
is squandering a fruit he is forbidden by law to take. And not just
him: he would not have dared to break the law had he been on his
own and less mindful of his need to belong (conf. 2.8.16). Augustine
weaves into his prodigals tale two of the elements that he associates
with original sin (Gen. 3:6): poverty of motive (there is no good
reason to defy God and lose Eden) and a disposition to substitute
consensus for a lack of reason (no one loses Eden alone). In so doing,
he shifts his focus to the prodigal nature of sin itselfa form of self-
willed poverty, veiled as a movement into licentious self-expression.
This focus of his becomes increasingly clear as he delves more
deeply into his motive for sinning and finds that he has to discard
along the way, like some prodigal analyst, all the obvious candidates:
material beauties, sensual pleasures, social perks, power plays. Sin,
he summarizes (conf. 2.5.10), is committed for all these and similar
goods when the better and best goodsyou, my God, your truth,
your laware deserted on account of an unlimited desire for them,
the most limited of goods. He is not explaining to us (or to God)
what sin is; he is underscoring sins fundamental mystery. For here
we have a desire whose ambition always mysteriously outstrips its
chosen objectas if it were essentially a desire not to be satisfied, a
desire for restlessness. Augustine and his adolescent friends may have
thought that the fruit of transgression gave them goods to spare.
In fact they were confusing divine love (extra-legal and self-offering)
with insatiable desire (illicit and self-consuming). The effect of such
confusion is, from the hindsight of confession, clear to Augustine
(conf. 2.10.18): I slipped away from you in my adolescence and
strayed, my Godit was a big detour from your steadiness, and
I became to myself a place of desolation (regio egestatis).
But what makes Augustines account of sin finally so hard to fathom
is his tendency to slip between effect and motive. It is sins effect, he
thinks, to sow alienation between his soul, the life of his body, and
God, the life of his soula split of life from life (conf. 3.6.10). Does
he also think that this effect, which is a prescription for dying,
doubles as a motive? Does his soul sometimes prefer death and the
withering of life to life in abundance? I loved being wrecked,
Augustine recalls (conf. 2.4.9); I loved my defection; I loved the
defecting in my defection and not something elsemy disfigured
40
soul breaking from your firm place into a shambles and craving not
some ugly thing but ugliness itself (dedecus). If we remember that
the opposite of God for Augustine (the ex-Manichee) is not ugliness
but nothing at all, then his souls desire to become absolutely ugly
sounds like a death-wish. But a few sections later he seems to imply
that the desire for ugliness is really just a twisted desire for more
life (conf. 2.6.14). The logic here is prodigal: bad souls get noticed;
good souls get ignored. When the prodigal Augustine affects to
love particular things (friends, pears) only to discard them for the
security of an objectless love, he marks his distance from God, whom
he imagines can and does love particular things without fear of
loss (conf. 2.6.13). At the same time he singles himself out, in his
pathetically prodigal way, as one of the things to be loved by God or
discardedperhaps both.
Augustine will compare his adolescent law-breaking to a prisoners
self-assertion. Such asserting takes place within the tightly restricted
bounds of an apparent impunity. It is at best a shadowy imitation of
absolute power (tenebrosa omnipotentiae similitudine; conf. 2.6.14), but
still an imitation. Does the prisoner want to be noticed and risk
punishment or be forever left to his tiny domain of self-assertion,
which is, in reality, a deceit (fallacia)? Augustine is still not sure,
looking back, whether a rejection of divine law is ever its own
motive. Can a soul really want to reject a law just because it is
absolutely a law?
Whatever the significance of Augustines hesitations about the
willfulness of sin (a topic for the next chapter), this much is already
fixed in his mind: that the soul cannot be materially human (incarnate)
and always have to reckon with the original loss, whether willed or
suffered, of its life with God. That conjunction spells prodigality
with a vengeance. For what could it mean to gain or lose a life if life
itself has already been removed from the picture? The material world,
when made to signify mostly Gods absence, ends up a ghostly sign-
post, everything in it pointing to what is not there. Material beloveds
make no lasting impression on the prodigal soul; they are just so
many disposable reminders of an unsatisfied desire for spirit. Their
loss occasions further craving but never real grief.
There is no alternative for Augustine to this pseudo-grief until he
begins to reckon with the loss of God within the material planea
grievable loss that (miraculously) leaves something of substance
behind. He tries to describe the impact of the human death of God
41
on his human grieving in book 4 of the Confessions, a book otherwise
preoccupied with the mere trappings of woe (conf. 4.12.19):
He who is our life came down to us, endured our death, and killed
it with his own lifes abundance: and like thunder, he called us to
return to him from here and into that hidden place from which he
first came forth to usthe virgin womb. It was there that humanity
was wedded to him, mortal flesh, not to be mortal forever. And
like a bridegroom from the bridal bed he leapt with joy from there,
a giant to run his course. For he did not delay, but ran calling out
with his words, actions, death, life, descent, ascentcalling out for
us to return to him. He left our sight, so that we might return to
our heart and find him there. He went away, and look: here he is.
The passage, with its weave of scriptural motifs (e.g., Jn. 6:33;
Ps. 18:6/ New RSV 19:5), is tricky. Augustine tells us that Christ has
killed death by dying, but when we look around us, we see quickly
that death is alive and well. People still die. How does the death of
Jesus Christ, God incarnate, change that basic fact? I take Augustine
to mean something like this: I get my life back, a resurrection of
sorts, when I stop trying to set the terms for my experience of a loved
ones death. It is through the confusion of a loss with the anticipation
of a loss that I am constantly willing the death of God and trying
to master the imagined world left to mea disposition that makes
me one of Augustines many prodigals. It is only the actual death of
God that can preempt whatever death it is that I have been trying to
imagine. All other candidates succumb to fear and the imagination
that fear inspires. If Christ is to be other than one more signpost to a
blind and fanciful craving for security, his death must be more than
the mere representation of a death. It must be real and his own; it
cannot be dematerialized and neatly traded in for a sign. He endured
our death (tulit mortem nostram), Augustine writes; in other words,
he died. Christs death is ours in the way that any death is: a thing to
be mourned, to be endured. This is not to deny the exceptional nature
of his death and the mystery that attends it. But the mystery is not
that Christ rises from the dead and renders all deathor perhaps all
deaths but onean illusion; it is that his death somehow makes it
possible for other deaths to remain irreducibly particular. The lives
that go along with those deaths are likewise particular. They return
from an unloved place in the imagination, a place of fear, to a region
42
of loss and renewal, where life is labored and often difficult, but no
longer desolate.
Ill conclude with a few thoughts about Augustines grief over the
death of his mother, Monnica, the person who most materially
shaped his self-conception. Indeed she appears in the Confessions as
something of an antithesis to the unnamed friend of book 4, whose
self-conception Augustine had done so much to shapeuntil those
startling last few days, which left him reeling in his grief. Whereas
Augustine was convinced that he could, given a fighting chance, use
his sophisticated intellect to keep his friend Manichean, Monnica
had a prophetic confidence that her (overly) sophisticated son would
one day abandon his Manichean conceits and return to the faith of
his childhoodher faith. She was not inactive in her confidence. She
followed him wherever he went, even when he clearly wanted to give
her the slip (conf. 5.8.15); she shared her dreams with him, which she
read as foreclosures of his fate (conf. 3.11.1920); she wept through
her anxieties for him before bishops, one of whom assured her (with
some exasperation) that she would never lose the son of those tears
(conf. 3.12.21); and when her sons moment of truth capped off his
bout of pure anguish in a Milanese garden, she was there, just
indoors, ready to hear all about his new resolve (conf. 8.12.30).
Augustine professes to have had mostly gratitude for the great
solace that Monnica gave him in life (conf. 9.12.30), but he was not
wholly without misgiving as to the depth of her influence on him,
right down to his core identity. The telling incident for him comes
early (conf. 4.11.1718). He seemed to be dying of chest pain and
fever while still a small boy, and believing what his mother believed
about salvation, he begged her for the sin-cleansing sacrament of
baptism. She hastily made the necessary arrangements for the ritual,
fearing his death was imminent. But when his fever suddenly broke,
she postponed his baptism on the supposition that her sons adolescent
transgressions were still ahead of him and would be less grievously
reckoned to his unbaptized soul. Augustine, looking back, clearly
would have preferred a path of less solicited transgression, even if
that were to have risked sins of greater gravity. His mother seemed at
the time to trust her sense of her sons psychology more than the
efficacy of the sacrament and the care of the Church. The hard part
about that for him, one may venture to suppose, is that she was right
about his psychology.
43
If sins narcissistic logic of all-or-none selfhood just is the logic of
love, then we have no more reason to believe in Augustines grief for
his mother than in his grief for his unnamed friend; in both cases, a
projective identification of the griever with the grievedin one case
self-aggrandizing (you are me), in the other self-effacing (I am
you)will have resolved his grief back into fear of death. But to
speak of grief this way is already to suggest that grief exists prior to
its narcissistic reduction and that the love in true grief is sinless.
Augustine describes getting a foretaste of this original love, while in
his mothers company, about a week before her death. I refer to his
famous description of his joint vision with her at Ostia, their port of
departure from Rome (conf. 9.10.2325). At the time of the vision
the two of them are looking out upon a garden at the house where
they were staying while waiting to go home; they talk intimately with
one another about what the eternal life of the saints must be like.
Soon they find themselves in an altered state, no longer connected to
the things of this perishable world; they are taken up into the inti-
macy of the unmediated Word, timeless and yet time-producing.
Augustines conversation with his mother continues even there, where
both hear with their minds, not their ears (conf. 9.10.25): Now we
stretch forth and in a blink of cognition (rapida cogitatione) touch
upon the eternal wisdom that abides above all things.
The visionary part of this vision is not of eternal wisdomthat is
imagelessbut of a mother and a son. Monnica in the vision is still
Monnica, and Augustine is still Augustine. There is no evidence of
dematerialization in this original state of things. Mother and son do
not merge into a single soul, nor do they sink into the abyss of God.
They talk with one another, even as the Word hovers eternally over
their breakable speech. Perhaps there is reason to think, if the vision
can be trusted, that being born of a woman is not a natural cause of
loves degeneration into something unlovable and not worth grieving.
If the Word can itself be born of a woman, then there is no reason
not to trust the vision. The grief that Augustine feels, or fails to, does
depend after all on a grievable God.
44
CHAPTER TWO
SIN AND THE INVENTION OF WILL
The work of the eye is complete now;
work next at the hearts work
on those images youve captured within you,
led in and overcome and left unknown.
Lookinside bridegroomon your inside bride,
so superbly drawn out of a thousand natures:
a beauty thus far won,
but thus far never loved.
Rainer Rilke (trans. William Gass)
There are two places in Augustines theology where the will appears
to be absolute, and by absolute I mean loosed from a sufficiently
motivating good and left to its own devices. One place is sin; the
human will to sin is always unaccountably perverse. The other place
is grace; the divine will to save is always generous beyond reckoning.
Lets begin with sin.
Suppose that I lie for the sake of a friendship and that my lie is a
sin (as is any lie for Augustine; see mend. 924). In keeping with the
characterization of sin that he advances in book 2 of his Confessions
(conf. 2.5.10), it may be true that I would not have lied were I not
trying to preserve a friendship (no, really, I love it when you bring
your kids to visit), but no friendship could ever move me all the way
to sin. Sinful desire is, by virtue of being sinful, poorly defined and
lacking in proper measure; it is desire that is always out of kilter with
the desirability of its object.
In the first book of On Free Will, written while Augustine was still
in Rome and in a decidedly anti-Manichean mood, he characterizes
sin as an unaccountable preference for temporal over eternal goods
45
(lib. arb. 1.15.31 to 1.16.34). Temporal goods are mundane things like
money, health, and citizenship; eternal goods are mighty abstractions
like God, Truth, and Law. Forget for a moment what it would mean
for a temporal being to love mainly the things of eternity. Augustines
point is that temporal goods are naturally limited in value; these are
the goods that can and will be lost involuntarily. If I deliberately
value a good as fragile and time-mortgaged as a friendship over
something as substantial and unchanging as the truth, then I am
reading a value into thingsan eternal valuethat is just not there.
It is not my mind, Augustine tells me, that initiates this kind of eisegesis,
but my will. Nothing but the will, he writes (lib. arb. 1.16.34), can
depose the mind from its original place of authority and proper
order (de arce dominandi rectoque ordine).
Now lets turn to grace. It is not clear how Augustines God can
will to love temporal things, like people, and avoid sins kind of eccen-
tricity, where wisdom and resolve fall out of alignment. The issue
here is not whether God can be conceived to have a reasonable basis
for preferring some people over others. It has been a stable feature
of Augustines doctrine of election, going back to the beginning
of his episcopacy (Simpl. 1.2; cf. retr. 2.1), that divine favor is never
merited. The selective advantages that might have allowed some
individuals to stand out and earn their place among the saints are,
in Augustines reading, all divine gifts. If I embody a virtue that you
do not have or come nearer to perfecting a virtue that is for you an ill
fit, I bear witness in my person to the workings of divine spirit; I do
not earn a claim to superior merit. My actions may sometimes be
more laudable than yours and vice versa, but as for the worth of our
respective persons, only God, on the basis of some kind of hidden
equity, humanly unfathomable (Simpl. 1.2.16), can judge.
However morally unsettling this doctrine of election may seem,
it distracts from the more basic issue of what an original grace is.
Suppose that there is a prior kind of goodness that can render some
people more worthy of divine favor than others. And lets be as
benignly Pelagian as possible about this. You have certain natural
giftsa quick and flexible mind, an unaffected affability, and a
gentle sense of humor; you also have certain natural liabilitiesa
disposition to debilitating self-doubt and a tendency to overindulge
your appetites. You resolve to enhance your gifts and minimize your
liabilities in the company of other self-improvers, all of whom have a
well-developed social conscience. You and the other members of
46
your dedicated communityyour churchconstantly encourage and
check one another, and over a period of years, you claim for yourself
an appropriate and hard-won measure of self-approbation. You do
not claim that you have made yourself worthy of Gods grace; you
simply believe that you made yourself better than you once were,
and you gratefully concede the help and support that you have
received along the way. This should seem (I hope) a plausible and
even pleasing picture of a value-added life.
But now imagine the superabundantly good and perfectly self-
communicative God being moved to notice the separate goodness
of our human flickers of reflected divine lightand we are still
supposing here that we have been able to enhance the reflection. It is
natural to assume that what there is for God to notice is not separate
light (there is no seam within light) but the human will to enhance
the lights intensityan initiative to add good to good. What would
such a will look like? Metaphorically speaking, it would be a form of
darkness, in that God is lacking, but a pregnant form of darkness,
in that God is wanted. The God who sees and acknowledges the
separate goodness of this will is able to read darkness into the light
of creation without having to break up the created order into light
and darkness (the fractured universe of the Manichees). This is a
miraculous kind of eisegesis, to be sure, if conceivable at all. Augustine
will tend to conceive of it in psychological terms. God interjects
desire for God deeply into the soul and then alters the souls environ-
ment of choice in order to elicit, develop, and ultimately to satisfy
that desire. Recall the great words (conf. 1.1.1): You stir us and we
delight to praise you, who made us yoursand so the heart within us
is restless until it rests in you. Augustine will sometimes emphasize
exterior prompting (Simpl. 1.2.13), at other times interior conception
(gr. et pecc. or. 1.13.14). Whatever his occasional emphasis, he always
brings his psychology of grace back to Pauls pair of questions in
First Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:7): What do you have that you have not
received? And if you have received, why boast as if you had not?
The presumptive answersnothing at all and I really have no
reason to boastleave the soul beholden but not bereft.
The distinction is crucial. If the soul claims its divine inheritance
its desire for Godfor itself alone, a private good, then it lives out
the part of the prodigals tale where the son divests himself of all his
wealth, loses his self-worth, and envisions his return to his fathers house
as a route to enslavement, albeit a slavery preferable to self-willed
47
poverty. If, on the other hand, the soul comes to see that its inheri-
tance is both received and still with Goda receiving that has never
annulled the giver (or, for that matter, the receivers indebtedness)
then we are at the part of the prodigals tale where the father sees his
son returning from a distance, rushes out to meet him, and reassures
him before they return together that he has never been other than a
much loved son to his father. Self-willed poverty not only does not
diminish that original love; it sets the stage for its entrance into a
human consciousness. Consider that the son is still in his wasteland,
his place of desolation (regio egestatis; conf. 2.10.18), when his
father comes calling.
What is it about the soul that makes it want to lose love in order to
regain it? This is what Augustine wonders (conf. 8.3.7). More than
that, he wonders what makes his divine father so favorably disposed
to resurrections (conf. 8.3.6). The father in Lukes parable had only
this to say to his perplexed and angry other son, the one who put such
stock in holding fast and never dying (Lk. 15:3132): Son, you are
always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate
and rejoicethis brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he
was lost and now is found. The words explain nothing. They simply
invite the older brother to be his brothers keeper and receive the
love he feels has been denied him: all that is mine is yours. It would
take a certain kind of prodigality to be able to accept such an invita-
tion, a give-away of self-definition. The older brother in Luke and
Augustines Pelagian both count on the self-definition of a virtuous
life; theirs is a virtue-first selfhood. They cannot accept the love that
preempts their virtues without undoing themselves. But they are not
being asked to accept; they are being prompted to remember. And
when they begin to recall that they are themselves the prodigals they
disdain, being creatures of change, they will also need to remember
what never changes. Augustine accents the note of stability in his
gloss of the prodigals eternal father (conf. 8.3.6): You are always
the same, and the things that are not always the same you always
know in your same way.
It is tempting to imagine something very abstracted, almost wholly
spectral here: we have the divine father who is at one with his own
knowing but who is alien to the dying things known to him. He just
looks out from the eternal side of his window onto time, change, and
loss and never leaves the house. But how can this be the God who
sees his time-tried children from a distance and descends to meet
48
them where they stand, even when they are hell-bent on being some-
where else? Augustines descending God introduces what seems to be
contrary motion into the appetite for life, motion that is mimicked or
parodied by the sinful soul: a superabundant being moves into the
poverty of time; a needy but self-aware being moves into the greater
poverty of sin. All this is going to be unaccountable and a check
against philosophy if self-diminishment is being willed as an end in
itself and not as a nod, however veiled, to some kind of vitalitya
changing constant.
When Augustine was a Manichee and still worshipping at the altar
of a limited being, he was not thinking that the God of light willed to
have his light darkened or that God of darkness, covetous of light,
willed to be so needy. This was just how things were. When he reads
some of the books of the Platonists (libri Platonicorum; conf. 7.9.13)
and imagines himself decisively freed from his old and much frayed
piety, he begins to underscore the willfulness of his souls alienation
from Godas if his God were to have created everything about him
but his will to sin. But this is not obviously (or even consistently) a
Platonist way of thinking. Plotinus, the great third-century Platonist
and a mind much admired by Augustine (c. Acad. 3.18.41), associates
evil (
) with free-form want and disorder and denies that we

have it within us to initiate true chaos (enn. 1.8.5): We cannot be,
ourselves, the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves; Evil was
before we came to be; the Evil which holds human beings down binds
them against their will.
In this chapter I want to look more carefully at absoluteness of will
in Augustine. I especially want to test the connection in his thought
between will and spirita conjunction that speaks to his Platonism.
He gets from the Platonists, Plotinus especially, a philosophical idiom
for articulating the distinction between the richly knowable world
where God dwells (the fathers country, the patria) and the world of
scarcity and struggle, a construct of sin and the senses, where Gods
presence is either overlooked or withdrawn (the distant country of
the prodigal, the saeculum). For Augustines purposes, the most
important thing ever to have happened in the history of philosophy
is Platos discovery of the difference between an intellected world
(mundus intellegibilis) and a sensed one (mundus sensibilis)a
discovery he passes along to the school of philosophy he founds: the
Academy. After Plato, Christians would have a way of joining with
philosophers in a mutual disdain for the wisdom of this (sensed and
49
sinful) worldthe philosophy that our sacred writings quite rightly
despise (c. Acad. 3.19.42).
In his critique of the Academics, the first work of his post-conversion
philosophy (and so written shortly after November of 386), Augustine
tries to beat back the skeptical turn of the Academic tradition
taken, he thinks, in reaction to Stoic materialismand convince his
Christian auditors that knowledge, or the return to the epistemic
equivalent of Gods country, is at least possible. Near the end of his
meandering display of philosophical hope, Augustine advances the
unexpected thesis that the Academics never believed in their own
skepticism; they were merely trying to dissuade others from adopting
a conception of knowledge that was restricted to bodies and bound
to be deceived even about them (c. Acad. 3.17.38 to 3.20.43). The
more seasoned Academics revealed the heart of Platonismits
dogma of the two worldsonly to mentally purified insiders.
As a historical thesis about the inner workings of the Academy,
Augustines posit of an esoteric tradition is at best slimly supported
conjecture, but as an expression of his own sense of the limits of
disputation, his posit speaks worlds. Of course his Platonists would
lack the argumentative means to call the most sophisticated materialists
of their daythe Stoicsback home. The Stoics were like any others
whose thoughts wander the world of sin and sensibilia, a truth-like
world but not true (illum uerum, hunc ueri similem; c. Acad. 3.17.37):
they may be led to notice the poverty of their situation by way of the
limited and wholly negative offering of skepticism, but no argument
could be expected to convert their poverty to wealth.
Fundamentally for Augustine we do not arrive at truth; the truth
arrives at us and embraces us in our place of bodily internment. The
result is less the satisfaction of our desire to live secure in the truth
than its humanization. Augustine adds to Platonism the irony of an
intelligence that has become in its self-offering more human than
most humans have been willing to be. Apart from the power of that
irony to reshape a consciousness, there is no escape for us from the
truth-like world of appetite and imagination and into something
real; there is no Platonism (c. Acad. 3.19.42):
This philosophy [Platonism] is not the philosophy of this world
the philosophy that our sacred writings quite rightly despise, but
of the other world, the intelligible one. But the most refined kind
of reasoning would never recall souls there who have been blinded
50
by the multiform darkness of error and dulled by the meanest
kind of corporalitynot unless God on high, out of a kind of
general clemency, were to bend and lower the source of divine
intellect to the level of a human body. Stirred not only by com-
mands but also by things done, souls could collect themselves and
regain their sense of their fathers country, even without an arse-
nal of arguments.
Augustine does not say that arguments in philosophy are useless, but
he implies that they are not very useful apart from the shock of a
prior recognition. The recognition has something to do with how
achingly open the desire for wisdom must remain in a context of a
human life, where divinity touches down but never rests; the shock
comes with seeing how easy it has been to serve a childlike form of
this desire, more given to appetite and imagination, and to resist the
beauty of its development.
So far all of this is more or less in line with Plato, whose Socrates
the paradigmatic teacher of philosophyhas an uncanny sense of
the divine possibilities of an open desire for wisdom and of the awful
cost of fixing the form of that desire prematurely. But where Plato is
not making Socrates out to be the personification of divine eros
(despite a few hints to the contrary in the Symposium), Augustines
Jesus expresses in his person the perfect intimacy between infinite
wisdom and open desire. And open is what a finite desire for infinite
wisdom has to be. The satisfaction of such desireand so the end of
a life of prodigal longingdoes not, however, have to cost us our
humanity, not if God, while still being fully God, has been able to
live with his. Again the truth of the incarnation is, for Augustine,
never vouchsafed through argument; either that peculiar Advent has
already entered into philosophical memory, or philosophy is a name
for aimless wandering in a foreign land.
Augustines thickly Christological qualification of philosophical
possibility is apt to seem anti-philosophical to all but the most self-
surrendering types. Although I do not share that impression myself,
I want to give it its due. How can a fact as peculiar and particular as
the conjoining of the eternal Logos to a first-century Nazarene rabbi
possibly matter to the history of philosophy? Note that I say fact
and not idea. If the particular fact of the incarnation makes all the
difference, then the Platonists who live before Christ have no hope of
sharing in the form of intelligence that they have so oddly been able
51
to describe. If it is the idea that matters, then in theory at least those
same Platonists may have found some way, other than having to be
reborn in Christian times, to get to the idea that the two worlds are
really one in Gods logic: hence the Word made flesh.
Augustine sometimes talks as if Christianitythe Christ-event
and the historical churchwere the authoritative means by which
whole peoples could come to resist the love of temporal things and
know (eventually) what a few Platonists once knew to be spirit. As he
puts it in On True Religion, a Platonist-friendly early work (c. 390;
vera rel. 4.6), Christianity emerged to close the gap between the
timid guesses of the few and the manifest correction and redemption
of multitudes. If the implication is that the old Platonists had the
right knowledge but no means of conveying it effectively, even to
themselves, then Augustines qualified praise of Platonic foresight is
puzzling, to say the least. It is like the prodigal son praising his older
brother for his keen prior knowledge of their fathers house. Nothing
about that knowledge would have kept the prodigal from leaving. At
the time he knew as much about his fathers love for him as his older
brother didand as little.
The alternative reading has Augustine sensing illusion in Platonist
claims to knowingthe illusion that they have managed more than a
gifted guess at higher things. They get appropriately disillusioned (if
they do) in the same manner that anyone does: divine reality intrudes.
Augustines Christian Platonists, who confuse love of the higher with
disdain for the lower, are no less burdened with illusion. They are
just promoting a different form of it. I resort again to the prodigals
tale. The old Platonists, calling themselves pagans, make the older
brothers mistake: they claim knowledge of (spiritual) wealth. The new
Platonists, calling themselves Christians, make the younger brothers
mistake: they presume to know what (spiritual) poverty is. Neither
brother has reckoned yet with the unsettling generosity of their
fathera generosity they have scarcely been able to imagine. When it
hits them, they will have to reckon not only with their own illusions
but also with one anothers. There is an intimate relationship in
Augustines mind between Platonism and Christianity, but neither of
these soul-maps has the power to describe for him more than places
in his imaginationunless God decides otherwise and wrecks what
has proved to be an imaginary integrity.
When Augustine describes his own reception of Platonism in book 7
of the Confessions, he seems at first to be describing his initiation
52
into the knowledge of divine wealth, to be followed all too quickly by
his return to familiar, God-bereft poverty. Such an impression
encourages the readinga commonplace in the scholarshipthat
leaves Augustine Platonist in his mind but Christian in his resolve; he
supposedly gets help from the incarnate God to disdain the world of
bodies and begin his road home to an immaterial paradise. The chief
failing of this reading is that it makes Platonism into what it can never
be for Augustine: a solution, if even only a partial one, to the problem
of sin. That problem is not primarily a lack of knowledge but a
presumption of ita willful ignorance. In book 7 Augustine struggles
with his temptation to believe that he been given, through Platonism,
his insiders glimpse of his fathers wealth (older brothers knowledge)
and that he has generated, through his own sin, his outsiders grip on
poverty (younger brothers knowledge). It is only in book 8, where he
yields to a directive to put on Christ and look no longer to lusts to
care for his flesh (Rom. 13:1314; conf. 8.12.29), that he finally sees his
two-faced temptation for what it is: a temptation.
At the end of book 7 Augustine is at that place in his knowledge of
God where his Platonists of old once were in theirs: he seems to know
before he knowsa knowledge B.C., even though Augustine lives, in
the most obvious of ways, in Christian times (tempora Christiana).
Christ has lived and died, and there can be no doubt, he says
(vera rel. 3.3), as to which religion should be held above the rest.
He also claims that the old PlatonistsPlato and the rest of them
would have been Christian in Christian times, with the change of
a few words and a few sentiments (vera rel. 4.7). But Augustines
Platonism does not make him a Christian, and it is here, at the strange
disjuncture between philosophy and reverence, that the difference
between Platonism old and new ceases to matter very much. For it is
not Platonism, minus Christ, that supplies Augustine with his most
tempting illusion of a disincarnate knowledge; it is his own will that
has supplied him with that, under a pretense of absoluteness. Or so
I will try to explain.
PATHOS OF WILL
Place of unlikeness
His long adolescenceunspeakably bad (conf. 7.1.1)behind him,
Augustine enters into his thirties feeling mentally blocked. His best
53
philosophical intuition keeps him firmly convinced that something
incorruptible and so incapable of losing any of its value is essentially
better off than something more vulnerable. But his imagination for
incorruptible being remains, to his shame, still stubbornly materialist
a hang-over, he surmises, from his Manichean days. It is not that he
thinks of God as an outsized human being, with eternally perfected
body parts, but the subtlest alternative he can muster has God play-
ing the part of a boundless cosmic sea, into which the sponge that is
everything else, big but finitely big, has been thrown (conf. 7.5.7):
from all sides and in every part the sponge was filled by the immense
sea. The problem here is that Augustines matter-bound imagination
is blocking him from being able to conceive of his relationship to an
incorruptible source of value.
Try to think for a moment in crudely materialist terms about value
(it is not as easy as it may seem at first). Take materialism to be the
thesis that matter is all there is. The materialist God, a being of perfect
and inviolate goodness, must be possessed of a certain kind of material
perfection. Ignore for now the question of whether a materialist per-
spective admits of the idea of a particular kind of thingas opposed
to a brute, unclassifiable particularity. Ignore whether it admits of
ideas at all. The thing to notice is that this God cannot, by nature,
undergo material additions or subtractions. If he were to do so, this
necessarily self-confined father-figure would become more or less
valuable than he already is at presenta sign of imperfection.
Augustine hears in this kind of reasoning a decisive refutation of
Manichean materialism. The Manichees posit a form of materiality
that is not Gods. They refer to this matter, says Augustine, as a race
of darkness (gens tenebrarum: conf. 7.2.3). Darkness can sometimes
connote evil or what is absolutely other to God, but here such God-
bereft otherness is simply a function of material differentiation.
I cannot be parted from a source of materialist value without lessen-
ing the source. The God of the Manichees suffers diminution merely
by virtue of having company. Augustine protests that so delicate a
deity can hardly be God. The real God, incorruptible by nature, must
somehow be less material and more substantial.
Materialism fails Augustine less because it overvalues matter than
because it lacks the internal resources for expressing non-alienating
difference. Really all difference is at bottom non-alienating. Absolutely
alien things would have nothing in common and so no basis of dif-
ferentiation, not even thinghood. When two things are intelligibly
54
different, they are also always, in some way, the same kind of thing.
The relevant sameness varies with context. Augustine and Alypius
are two different men; Augustine and Monnica two different human
beings; Augustine and his dog Rex (if he had a dog Rex) two different
animals. Materiality may be doing most of the work of differentiation
within a kind (the body count), but as the kind is capable of being at
more than one place at the same time (usually a deal-breaker for
something material), it is not unreasonable to think that material
differentiation is a matter of more than mere matter. Naturally I am
not trying to foreshorten, in a few short sentences, the great late-modern
quest for a materialist account of concepts and concept-acquisition;
I am simply pointing out that materialism, as Augustine has come
to know it, suffers from an inner poverty. Once he gets over the idea
that the Manichees have used it to define a workable difference
between God and evil, he finds himself losing his hold on that differ-
ence altogether.
His initial inclination is to move in the direction of differentiated
will. God, who is the good, wills only the good; the human being,
derivatively good and created in Gods image, has a choice: either will
the good or will its undoing (Gods absence). It was my intent to
look into what I kept hearing, Augustine recalls (conf. 7.3.5), that
the cause of our wrongdoing and our being subject to your just
judgment is the free choice of the willbut this was a cause I failed
to see limpidly. The obscurity to which he confesses has to do with his
lack of a good answer to this question: how is it that the divine and the
divinely created will can have very different forms of expressionas
different as good is from evil? If it had been clear to Augustine at the
time that the will (voluntas) owes nothing to matter for its expression
(i.e., that the will is an immaterial agent), then he might have been
moved to invoke the will itself as the determiner of good and evil, a
move that would have utterly devalued materiality. But it was not so
clear to him, prior at least to his reception of Platonism, how expres-
sions of will could be other than the effects of material forces. And
given the wills essential materiality, the boundlessly material divine
being (boundless, so to speak, on all sides) would surely have incor-
porated within itself all possibilities of will: Augustines, the devils,
anyones. Whatever the appearance of independent action, the
bounded actor will have been expressing a materiality none other
than Gods own. These thoughts, Augustine confesses (conf. 7.3.5),
were weighing me down once again, and I could barely breathe.
55
Early in the summer of 386, a season or so before he finds his feet
with Jesus, Augustine gets either a gift or a loan of booksPlatonic
writings, all translated from Greek into Latinfrom a man he never
names, but whom he describes as a big windbag, distended with pride
(immanissimo typho turgidum; conf. 7.9.13). The effect of these books
on Augustines self-conception is little short of momentous. He heeds
their directive to him to move into his inner depths (mea intima) and
see things from an insiders point of view. With God as his guide
(duce te), he soon arrives at inner illuminationlight for the souls
eyebut just as quickly he is snatched away and taken up into a
place of unlikeness (regio dissimilitudinis; conf. 7.10.16), where he hears
his creator from afar and sees all the other things (cetera; conf. 7.11.17),
the stuff of creation, below. His point of view, elevated but not
ultimate, proves to be mostly unsettling (unlike anything familiar),
but the ex-Manichee does emerge from the experience roused from the
doldrums of skepticism and made aware of the truth of spirit, seen
and understood by way of things made (conf. 7.10.16; Rom. 1:20).
Does he come away, then, with a new spiritual conception of him-
self, freed from his material self-image and ready to be judgedspirit
before spiritby the God of commanding will? I doubt it. Given his
fuller description of his view from unlikeness, noting particularly
his way into that view and his way out, Augustine seems to have
been released from a fiction of selfhood, but without being issued
new spiritual credentials. His God has used the books of certain
Platonistsmostly Plotinus, perhaps some Porphyryas a Trojan
horse into his psyche: a gift of Greek wisdom, normally an incentive
to pride of spirit, here humbles the recipient and checks his pride.
Admittedly the humbled Augustine does not appear to spare the
Platonists his critique of their pride; although they presume to know
a great deal about spiritual matters, they still know nothing, he sub-
mits, about the essential humility of spirit and Gods astounding,
even disconcerting, love of mortal flesh. But all this is best taken
from him as self-indictment (conf. 7.19.25): As for the mystery held
in the Word made flesh, I was incapable of even a guess. Augustine,
in confession, is the very Platonist he is critiquing.
At the summit of his Platonist presumption, where he sees himself
well lit and really loving the good God, not some figment, Augustine
is disposed to believe that only his sexual habit (consuetudo carnalis;
conf. 7.17.23)that witless drive of his to bond with fleshcan call
him back into the cave of ignorance. And when his lower self, as he
56
understands it, does come calling, it drags him weak as a baby from
his rapture and rejoins him to his carnal attachments. Once again he
will face old temptations: about flesh, about spirit, about what he
thinks he knows about the two and when he thinks he knows it. But
this time he is fortified, not with the question that he has made of
himself, but with the question that God has made him to bethe
question within the question. The Augustine that we meet in book 7
of the Confessions has had his place of inner poverty (regio egestatis;
conf. 2.10.18) transformed into a foreign country, a land of unlikeness.
He is being invited to give up his recognition of this place.
Consider his initiation into unfamiliarity. I refer not to his studied
retreat to the inmost precincts of his psyche, but to what he speaks of
as an involuntary assumption: When I first learned of you, he tells
God (conf. 7.10.16), you raised me up so that I might see the reality
of what I was seeing and that I, who was seeing, was not yet real.
Dissimilitude is of the very essence of such a perspective. Augustine
is being shown, among other things, that he has yet to exist; surely he
would have to become unlike himself, an existing being, to take in
that truth. But why would he want to take it in? It is a truth that
seems to offer him only privation and his lifes undoing, a trade of
the solid now of his existence for some shadowy not yet. The words
that he first hears from his far-off God, calling to him in his unlikely
place, seem far from reassuring (conf. 7.10.16): I am the food of
grown-ups; grow and you will feed on me. You will not change me
into you, as you do the food of your flesh, but you will be changed
into me.
Augustine has a strange reaction to hearing these words. He begins
to think that this voice without a body, the voice of truth itself (veritas),
is no less real for being bodiless. Perhaps he prefers, understandably
enough, to push back the thought of being materially absorbed into
God, like some piece of digestible matter. More tellingly this kind of
thought (crudely materialist) is giving way in him to a new kind of
thought: that his souls distention, its stretch into unlikeness, is as
much about self-exile as it is about a flesh-bound life. The God who
helps him sort out the difference is not the one who gives him his
alternative to his material existence; it is the one who abides with him
even while he refuses to abide with himself. When Augustine hears
that being name itselfI am who I am (conf. 7.10.16; Exod. 3:14)
his doubts about the sweep of Gods existence, the full scope of it,
disappear. This is the God who can lead selves out of exile, return
57
them to himself, and remain throughout it all eternally self-consistent.
Augustine now knows that material otherness, or what turns out to
be the created order, is no place of exile for God (conf. 7.10.16;
Rom. 1:20): I would sooner have doubted I was alive than doubt the
truth that is seen and understood by way of things made.
When Augustine offers his commentary on the things made, he
underscores two aspects of what he sees: the corruptibility and the
beauty. Things are corruptible and so liable to lose the beauty of
their being just by virtue of not being God: I surveyed the things
below you, he writes (conf. 7.11.17), and I saw that they do not
wholly exist nor wholly not existthey exist, being from you, but
they do not exist, not being you. All of the things that are not God
are, in a sense, naturally unlike themselves, a mix of nil and being.
But taken together, Augustine observes, they can be seen to compose
a whole universea thing of perfect beauty. There is simply no evil
for you, he tells God (conf. 7.13.19), and not only for you, but for
the world of your creation; for nothing is able to break in from the
outside and wreck the order you have set in place.
When he moves from corruptible things to the beauty of the whole,
Augustine seems to forget that he has been describing corruptibility
as an internal matter, the not-being-God liability: the whole of cre-
ation, not being God, should be as close to non-being as any of its
parts. If it is not, then this can be only because God, as the ultimate
imposer of order, has lent stability to the whole that he has not lent
to the parts. They too can be beautiful for a time, but their temporary
beauty is always a subordinate matter, a nod to the stable whole.
Having seen the whole, Augustine is ready to adopt the way of think-
ing I have just described. Here are his words (conf. 7.13.19): I was no
longer wishing for better things, now that I was thinking of all things
togethernot that superior things arent still better than inferior
ones, but I was holding myself to a healthier judgment: that the good
of the whole is better than the best part. The logic of valuation here
is less strange than the vision motivating its application. And in this
case, it is going to be more illuminating to bring out the strangeness
than to follow the logic.
Suppose I try to fit myself into Augustines vision of a perfected
creation. I am, like anything else, somewhere in the et cetera of
existencein the sum of things that can be added to God. If there is
a summary vision to be had of this sum, I ought to be in it. My first
problem of placement is that I have little or no conception of the
58
displaced self (supposedly me) that is looking for itself (still me) in
the order of things. I have had one birth; I expect to have one death.
What is it that can distance me from my particular birth and death
and still somehow leave me with me? I fashion the idea of myself.
I can imagine this idea playing itself out in a material life, perhaps
more than one. Even so, I am not the idea of me. I am me. And it is
my stubborn materiality that is going to give me my quickest sense of
being a whole unto myself. (Here I withhold judgment about how
trustworthy this sense is.)
My second problem of placement begins to loom. How can I be
part of an alien beauty? Of course I can conceive of beauty that is
not my own. I have found that this is the great thing about beauty:
that it is not all mine. I can be inspired by its difference and released
for a time from having to attend so myopically to the necessities of
my self-conception. Indeed I cannot even see my own beauty until it
gets refracted and rendered alien to me through the regard of others.
They see my beauty as different; I see it through them as different.
If my primary relation to beauty is to be that of a part to a whole,
then I lose the material difference that opens me to the otherness of
beauty and thereby to its inspiration. If I have any hope of seeing the
beauty of Augustines perfected whole of a creation, then I must be
on the outside looking in; I cannot be a part of what I see. I have no
material place, then, in his idea of creation; if I try to inhabit a place,
I disappear into an idea (the idea he presumes to be Gods).
Perhaps that is an insight. Plotinus tried to remind us that soul
does not translate into matterat least not the higher or best part of
soul (see especially enn. 4.8, his tractate on the souls descent). The
best part never descends into time and space and so remains
untouched by the materiality that we commonly confuse with the
body. True materiality (U
), for Plotinus, is truths inner antithesis.

It is not, as some Manichee might be inclined to think, the gross
opposite of truth (dark and heavy stuff as opposed to light); it is
the paradoxical place where truth becomes unlike itself. Plotinus
has a name for the paradox. He calls it, picking up on a similar notion
in Plato (Politicus 273 D6E1), a place of unlikeness (
; enn. 1.8.13). Here is where some part of soul, clearly

not the best part, descends to order absolute disordera fools
errand. Again the body is not at the root of the seduction; the body
is what the soul creates and inhabits in an effort to bring form and
beauty to chaos (enn. 4.8.5). It is the chaos and its eternal tease of
59
new order that seduces. The philosophical life, when set against this
tease, gets styled as the higher souls attempt to pierce through its
needy material persona and prompt ecstatic recollection. The adept
of Plotinian philosophy comes to self-identify with soul alone and no
longer with some hybrid of spirit and matter (enn. 1.4.14). Put other-
wise: the soul, having passed through unlikeness, gladly returns to
itself and its spiritual home in the Onethe passing of solitary to
solitary (enn. 6.9.11).
It is tempting, given Augustines focus on ecstatic knowledge in
book 7, to superimpose a Plotinian itinerary on his findings. But the
fit is awkward. Yes he does discover that God is not defined, as a
body is, by time and space, and yes this certainly avails his theology
of a rich vein of Platonist speculation about spirit. On the other
hand, he makes this discovery while in a place of unlikeness. And
while it is quite likely that he lifts the term, regio dissimilitudinis, from
his Latin translation of Plotinus, it is not at all clear that he uses the
term with a Plotinian intonation. When Plotinus speaks of the souls
movement into place of unlikeness, he is referring to the souls
tendency (unaccountably perverse) to identify with the chaos that it
is otherwise disposed to order. If the identification were ever to be
total (and this may be describing an impossibility), soul would
no longer be soul but something wholly materiala condition of
soul-death. There is reason to think that Augustine views the desire
behind sin similarly (it is soul-suicidal desire), but in terms of what
he overtly describes in book 7, it is not sin that puts him into his
place of unlikeness; his God has done thatand without asking.
Unlikeness in this case is a given and even an original condition
of Augustines soul. He is being reminded that he is unlike God.
A reminder of that sort cannot be a form of knowing for Plotinus,
who expects only falsity from unlikeness, never truth (enn. 1.8.1).
And so where Plotinus is looking to leave his place of unlikeness,
Augustine is seeking a way to live in his. It is, after all, from a place of
unlikeness that Augustine comes to know how profoundly he already
loves truth. He has no conceivable reason to want to leave.
The departure he describes is involuntary (conf. 7.17.23): I was
not stably fixed in my delight of you, God: I got swept up to your
beauty and then soon I was torn away from you by my weight;
I crashed into lower things (in ista) and groanedthat weight, it
was my sexual habit. In his description, he does not specify very
precisely what the lower things are. His Latin phrase, in ista, conveys
60
a sneer, contempt for the familiar: ugh, those things again. Given that
they are the objects of Augustines sexual habit, I assume that you
can imagine as well as I what manner of object they may be. It is
strange to him, of course, and humiliating, that his bodily desire
his desire, in fact, for a bodycan outweigh his love of God. He will
want to return to his old philosophical intuition, about the superior-
ity of the incorruptible beloved, and add a Platonist gloss. None of
this, however, will help him. He will only be further encouraged to
think that he has the power to will his unlikeness to God and that his
descent into a sexual history has somehow, deep down, been his
choice to make.
Augustine knows that he has no good answer to the questions that
emerge out of the blind spot in his self-knowledge: why chase after
the lesser beauty, why desire a diminished good? Plotinus certainly
cannot tell him why a part of his soul (a part?) breaks from soul and
develops a taste for material chaos and self-undoing. To seek the
answer in some stupid pride (superbia; civ. Dei 12.6) or in a reckless
daring (
; enn. 4.8.5) is to paste a label on an incoherence: for

what gives birth to a dark and perverted wisdom if not an impossibly
original darkness? When we begin in the absolute light of God, we
expect ourselves, like the older brother in the prodigals tale, to want
to remain at home. But the issue for Augustine is not whether he can
ever have a good answer to his questions, but whether not having
an answer is itself a kind of clue, a plumb line into the mystery of
his will. Perhaps he is being clued in to the essential truth of his
individuality: that his will is his bottom line, that nothing in him runs
deeper than that. I doubt whether his description in book 7 of his
involuntary return to his mundane senses, sexual habit and all, can
sustain this conclusion, but it is important to entertain, along with
him, the possibility that it does. We can then begin to see how one of
his most deeply held assumptions about his willthat it is most his
when he sinsthreatens to render the Word made flesh into the
wrong kind of mystery.
Debriefing on beauty
In the wake of his unsettling return to the world of his sexual habit,
Augustine replays for himself, with selective focus, his experience
elsewhere. He has just come down from a higher elevation of beauty.
What should he be taking away from the trip? What needs to be
61
emphasized, clarified, and preserved in his memory? The task before
him is a debriefing of sorts: he reports to himself about where he
has been, as if he has been, in some respects, a stranger to his own
highest regard.
He begins his debriefing by reconstructing his ascent. This time
he emphasizes the inner unfolding of his desire for beauty and not
the divine hand that snatches him from his place of familiarity and
puts him at creations peak. At the familiar place, the bottom of his
perspective, there is his usual appreciation for sensible beauties.
He is nudged out of familiarity and up a step when he thinks to
ask questions (conf. 7.17.23): I asked about my approval of the
beauty of bodies, celestial and terrestrial; I asked about what it was
in me that was rendering summary judgment on changeable things
and saying: this ought to be like this, that not like that. His line
of inquiry puts him in touch with his own mutable mind. There
he finds an interior energy (vim interiorem) with a dual aspect.
Like any sentient creature, Augustine is able to take in a flood of
sense impressions and organize them instantaneously into a world
of (relatively) stable material objects. But this is an unreflective
awareness. When his interior energy becomes self-reflective,
Augustine adds the work of reason to sensibility. He starts to
become aware of what he is bringing to his senses: not just the
bare supposition of substancethe supposition of the thing that
endures the changebut also the appraisal that renders the thing
good or bad, appealing or repulsive.
In his debriefing, Augustine alludes to the two fundamental
insights of self-awareness. One is that the mind cannot derive its
standards for evaluating mutable things from mutable things. Those
things shift in value, get better or worse, but the standard that the
mind applies to themthink of it for now as a concept of value
cannot shift in the same way; if it did, then the mind would lose its
capacity to conceive of change and chart the better course. Such a
mind would still be a mind only in the degenerate way that a corpse is
a body. The other insight of self-awareness follows upon the first, and
it cuts more deeply into ordinary, largely unreflective consciousness.
The self-aware mind comes to see that mind, being mutable, cannot
self-generate a stable basis of judgment; the concepts that guide
its evaluation of things change over time, sometimes for the better,
sometimes not. (I have now a better notion of justice than I had
when I was a child, but perhaps a diminished notion of joy.) Granted
62
concepts generally change more slowly than do the things they
conceptualize, but they do change. The adolescent Augustine does
not have the same concept of erotic love as the older man who,
having had to bury his adolescent son, wants to be (along with his
church) the bride of Christ. One hopes for improvement of course,
but the change is palpable all the same. When Augustine really takes
to heart the mutability of even his concepts for speaking about
change, his mind cracks open, struck as if by lightning, and he has
his short-lived but direct opening to the unchangeable itself, or that
which is (id quod est; conf. 7.17.23). He comes away from the encounter
knowing in his depths that sameness is preferable to change; indeed
the alternative preference is not readily conceivable. The changing
things of this world speak only of God.
End of the debriefing. At one level, a fairly superficial one, it is
clear what Augustine most wants to remember about his trip to
unlikeness and the inassimilable God. He wants to remember who
God is, and by remembering he means that he wants more than a
moments rapture. He wants a lifetime of stability with God, a home
in a place of unlikeness. And what is keeping him from this? He tells
us that he was too weak to translate vision into flesh and take his
sustenance from God, the food so unlike his usual fare (conf. 7.17.23):
My ability to focus left me, and with my weakness resurgent
I returned to familiar things, taking with me nothing but my memory
for lovea desire scented, as it were, with the fragrance of what I was
not yet able to consume. Having situated himself somewhere between
a frustrated gourmand and a wistful lover, Augustine quickly revises
the image and casts himself as an infant, too little to take in solid
food. His hope is no longer for fixation in a spectacular vision but for
divine care of his flesh, like a mother nursing her baby. It took him
a while, well longer than it takes to change a metaphor, to bring
himself to hope for this (conf. 7.18.24): I had no hold of my God,
the humble Jesus, not being humble myself, and I did not notice the
lesson that his weakness was meant to teach.
Apparently this is what Platonists do not get about God. They do
not get the gift of a divine show of weakness because they do perceive
their need for it. They prefer their God to remain on top of a meta-
physical mountain peak and wait for them there, while they work
through their confusion of two worlds, one of flesh, the other of spirit.
Augustine credits the apostle Paul, who had much to say in his letters
about spirit and flesh, for having alerted him to this unchastened side
63
of Platonism. I began reading, writes Augustine (conf. 7.21.27), and
whatever truth I found in the Platonists I found there, along with a
commendation of your graceso that no one who sees should boast
as if he were other than the recipient not only of the thing seen but
also the power to see it. On this reading of Paul, Platonists come off
as half-hearted boasters; they associate God with what they see, their
own discipline of mind with the seeing. It is odd, as I have already
suggested, for Augustines Platonists to have seen what they have no
means of seeing. But perhaps what Augustine means by having seen
is less a flash of ecstatic insight than a lifetimes labor of compassion
and self-knowledge. Granting that, there is still the very large
question of what the connection is between the ecstatically revealed
God, far removed from flesh, and Jesus of Nazareth.
BEAUTY MEMORIALIZED
From Plato to Paul
To get at the question ventured above, we are going to need a less
superficial reading of Augustines alleged discovery of that which
isthe ground of being. In book 8 of City of God, a book preoccu-
pied with the best and worst of pagan natural theology, the Platonists
generally come off well. Above all Augustine praises them for having
conceptualized better than anyone else the true nature of God. They
do not make the terrible mistake of confusing God with something
bodily, but more than that they have a precise sense of what makes
God unique. Whereas all other beings are corruptible (unless God
wills otherwise), God is the one being who is essentially at one with
the good. This is the great Platonist insight, their sublime sense of
Gods absolute simplicity (simplicitas; civ. Dei 8.6): It is not one
thing that he exists, another that he lives, as if he were able to exist
and not live; not one thing that he lives, another that he knows, as if
he were able to live and not know; not one thing that he knows,
another that he is well, as if he were able to know and not be wellno,
to live, to discern, to be well, that to him is what it is to exist. When
this notion of simplicity is mistakenly applied to finite, material
being, it drives God into an existential cul-de-sac and then walls off
the one way in, that of material contiguity; God will have become an
untouchable material being, having in regard to everything else an
entirely alien materiality. But because the Platonists know that God
64
is not a body (nullum corpus esse Deum; civ. Dei 8.6), they are free to
find in simplicity the source of everything elses coming to be.
For this they will need a heightened awareness. When Augustine
attempts to describe the heightening, he begins with a basic distinc-
tion between two objects of perception. It will quickly become for
him a distinction in perception. There is life (vita), and there is body
(corpus). Life is superior to whatever body it happens to animate,
and it requires a distinctive mode of perceptionintelligible rather
than sensibleto get at the profundity of the difference. Awareness
of mere bodies, the sensibilia, is the lowest kind of awareness; when
limited to sensibilia, the mind lacks a path to self-awareness. It can-
not, thus limited, direct a life that rises above the conflict between
blind appetite and aversion to pain. I will not venture to say whether
a life that limited is really, for Augustine, a human possibility; it seems
to follow from a degenerate perspective, not an original one. What-
ever the case may be, a heightening of perspective always begins with
a rudimentary love of beauty. Even the most simplistic delight in
beautiful thingsthe intellegibiliasuggests to Augustine an open
minds eye (civ. Dei 8.6): There is no corporeal beauty, not the fixity
of a figure, not the rhythm of a sing-song, that is not the minds to
appreciate. Admittedly we do not have to be terribly self-aware
to delight in nursery rhymes and simple shapes. The way forward
requires the mind to catch itself in the act of loving beauty and notice
the idea (species) that transcends the thing, the material bearer.
Beautiful things prompt the minds idea of beauty, but they do not
own or originate the idea that they prompt. The idea comes from
elsewhere, and its essential beauty can greatly, if not infinitely, dwarf
its mutable prompt. Much depends on how materially fixated the
mind of the viewer happens to be. The Platonists, whose minds, says
Augustine, are the least distracted, see very clearly that there is a
place where the original idea (prima species) is beyond change and,
for that reason, incomparable (civ. Dei 8.6). But of course this place
is less a place than a mode of beinguncreated but creative.
If we juxtapose Augustines confessional debriefing with his
analysis of the intelligibility of beauty in City of God, an ambiguity
emerges. Is God the object of beauty in comparison to which the
beauty of everything else isto be as generous as possiblenot
much? Or does God supply us with the idea of beauty that endures
through change? On the face of it, these are very different possibilities.
If I seek the beauty that is God, then having it I have no conceivable
65
beauty left to wantunless a lack of beauty is somehow beautiful. If
Augustine is imagining himself at his peak loving Gods beauty, then
it is a very dark force indeed that drags him away and returns him to
his love of beautiful things. But now consider Gods idea of beauty.
And keep in mind that Augustines word for ideacorresponding to
one of the Greek words for a Platonic form (
)is species; it
basically refers to whatever lends itself to looking, an appearance. If
I were to have Gods idea of beauty and that idea is, as Augustine
suggests, my basis for seeing beauty in change, then I would see my
changing world as God sees it, as an absolute beauty. This is the other
beauty that Augustine may have seen at his peak, where he was
pitched between God and the other things (et cetera). From there,
creation struck him as perfect, but also as unfriendly to further revision.
If he were to have added his unassimilated materialitynot yet
idealizedto the picture, he would have been undoing perfection.
The original idea of creation, being constitutionally changeless, rules
out this possibility. Nothing material can be added to the idea, and
materiality, apart from the idea, reduces to nothingness. Again
Augustine credits the Platonists for their insight. They were able to
see (civ. Dei 8.6) that both body and mind were more or less endowed
with idea (speciosa) and that if they managed to lack it altogether,
they would not exist at all.
Perhaps our two possibilitiesloving God, loving an idea of God
are not so different after all. Gods beauty overpowers Augustines
perception and removes him from creation; Gods idea of beauty
perfects creation in Augustines absence and keeps him from returning
there. The doctrine of simplicity suggests that these are two sides of
the same coin: God is not one thing, his idea of beauty another. But
now we have a source of being that reduces all of us ad absurdum
not to derivative beings but to shadows of illusions. We cannot
subsist and individuate in God, the all-absorbing beauty, and yet there
is nowhere else, outside of God, for us to be. The only other option
for existing, the material order of creation, is nothing if not Gods
idea of beauty. No truly mutable being is like that idea. Augustines
unlikenesshis place apart from both God and the created order
has become doubly perplexing: in itself and in relation to its antecedent
condition. Before Augustine was unlike God or Gods idea of beauty,
what was he like? It is hard to see at this point how the simplified
immaterial God is any easier for him to relate to than an idealized
creation. In either case, he would be relating to beauty as privation
66
relates to fullness. This is not a relationship; it is a corruption. And
given Gods immutability, it is not even a possible corruption.
But before we conclude that simplicity, the great Platonist insight
into God, is a hopeless confusion, one that thoroughly undermines
the distinction between creator and creature, we need to pay more
attention to Augustines assimilation of Plato to Paul. Everything
that is worth taking from a Platonist is, Augustine insists, to be found
in Paul, but in a better, more graceful form. Paul understands, as
your average, puffed-up, spiritually self-important Platonist does
not, that gratitude is of the essence of wisdom. Despite the character
flaw of your average (and, yes, caricatured) Platonist, Augustine says
that he is grateful for having loved Platonism before he ever learned
how to read Paul and love Jesus; his disillusionment with Platonism,
the best philosophy going, alerted him to the difference between
presumption and confession (inter praesumptionem et confessionem;
conf. 7.20.26).
Like many philosophically invested readers of Augustine, I have
struggled to grasp the nature and import of the presumption that
Augustine seeks to avoid. Does he mean that the Platonists presume
too much on their own strength and so look futilely within themselves
for the resources to break free of the dark and largely unconscious
bodily forces that keep a soul bound to fear and blind appetite? If
that is that case, does he think that Gods incarnation in Christ is
basically a gift of will, made available to those who give up their
presumption and confess their weakness? If so, God will have entered
into and embraced the flesh solely to break the claim that flesh has
on life: Jesus is born of woman, lives and dies, but then has his death
undone; his resurrection signals a new regime of spiritualized flesh,
eternally secured from death by the will of his father. (And is not
Paul the apostle of the resurrected Christ?) Augustine strongly
suggests this line of interpretation when he speaks of Christ as the
means by which Platonists find their way back to the fatherland, their
happy-making place (ad beatificam patriam; conf. 7.20.26). Although
they may sometimes have anticipatory moments of ultimate happiness,
these tiny ecstasies come to them through grace and not by way of
introspection, however well cultivated. It is only when they are moved
to confess their utter dependence on Gods flesh-conquering will that
their moments add up and they begin, at least on one way of reading
Augustine, to enter into life eternal.
67
Obviously I do not like very much this interpretation of Augustines
turn from Plato to Paul, even as I admit that Augustine himself
suggests it. If what his God offers us over time is sufficient strength
of will to break free from flesh and live a super-animated life,
shielded from change, then the means to wisdoma humble embrace
of incarnationbecomes curiously extrinsic to wisdoms end, an
eternity of immutable bliss. This is a picture that banks on the notion
that knowing the good and being willing to live by it are entirely
separate things. (God may be simple, but apparently we arent.)
There is another, more compelling way to interpret Augustines
Pauline turn, and this way is equally his suggestion. After his topple
from his peak experience and his fall back into fleshly habit, Augustine
is made aware of his native weakness. His soul has no sticking power;
it is too wed to its creature comforts to stay with God. Naturally
Augustine hopes, with divine help, to grow stronger over time, but of
course he will not avail himself of that help while he is still presuming
upon his own strength. His presumption has a Platonist feel to it,
although it is hardly just Platonist at root. On the strength of his
breakthrough experience, brief but vividly memorable, Augustine styles
himself a spiritual expert, a cognoscente of immaterialityinfinity
without extension, absolute simplicity, creative omnipotence, time-
lessness: I chattered openly about all this, he recalls (conf. 7.20.26),
as if I were an expert, but until I began to seek the way to you
in Christ, our redeemer, I was not skilled (peritus) but scuttled
(periturus). When Augustine does find his way of seeking years later,
with his nose in Paul, he discovers his true strength (unimaginably)
in the weakness of God. This is what happens to all those who
cease, out of wisdom, to place faith in themselves (conf. 7.18.24):
At their feet they see divinity made weak from wearing the tunic
of our skin; weary they prostrate themselves before it, but rising it
lifts them up.
I take from this that Augustines presumption has been as much
about the nature of his weakness as about the source of his strength.
If he misjudges or misses his presumption about his weakness, his
admission of weakness is not going to help him seek the right kind of
strength. False humility is just presumption by other means. So what
then has he been assuming about his weakness and how it may differ
from Gods tunic of skinthe tunic of our mortality, albeit
divinely retailored? And in what way (if any) have his assumptions
68
been presumptuous? The topic, when pursued in depth, takes us into
Augustines complex doctrine of original sin, and I want to reserve
the fuller discussion of that doctrine for the next chapter. For now
I restrict my focus to a section in book 3 of On Free Will, a book that
reflects his debt to Platonism but not his fervor for Paul. It dates
from around the time of his ordination in 394, the main impetus for
his plunge into Pauline exegesis. Toward the end of book 3, Augustine
describes the natural condition of human weakness that is, more
properly speaking, the penalty of sin (lib. arb. 3.19.54):
What a person does wrongly out of ignorance; what he cannot
do rightly, though he wants tothese are called sins and for this
reason: they have their origin in the sin of a free will. That prece-
dent of will warrants these sins, as its consequences. Consider: just
as we apply the term tongue not only to the organ we move in our
mouths when we speak but also to the consequence of that move-
mentthe form and sound of the words that allow us to speak,
say, of either the Latin or the Greek tongue, so we apply the
term sin not only to sin in the strict sense, to that which is done
knowingly and with a free will, but also to what has to follow from
sin, as its punishment. So also we speak of nature with a double
meaning: human nature, strictly speaking, refers to the original
creation, a blameless kind of thing; it can also refer to the penalized
condition into which we are born: mortal, ignorant, enslaved to
flesh. In that sense, the apostle says (Eph. 2:3): We also were
naturally children of wrath, just like everyone else.
Augustines Adam, the original sinner in the strict sense of sin, has, in
stark contrast to his children of wrath, an unburdened beginning:
no angry divine father, just a loving creator; no great ignorance or
difficulty, but wit enough to know better than to disobey God and
taste death. For no good reason, Adam follows his partner, the
woman, into disobedience, and the result, as described above, is
procreation that is naturally mortgaged to God-alienated flesh.
Augustine is aware that he has no explanation either for Adams
motive or for the mechanism by which Adams heirs experience the
effects of his sina clouded mind and a weakened willas if his sin
were theirs. His concern is not to account for the intimacy between
natal human weakness and an unnatural desire to nurse on Gods
absence but to emphasize it. We are all born with untrustworthy natures,
69
with needs that are bound to mislead us about what we really need.
As hard as it is to explain this twisted kind of naturalness, Augustine
insists that acceptance of its hold on us is the beginning of true
responsibility; it is the first step of our return to the fathers house.
If there is presumption in the weakness that Augustine attributes
to all the children of wrath, himself included, it lies in the idea that
human weakness has claim to a responsibility that is, as it were, more
than divine. Think of the natal weakness of God, the infant life
of Jesus. He has no inherited disposition to seek his life in God-
alienated flesh. Do we imagine then that he has no inclination to
nurse at his mothers breast? Augustine, of course, is not condemning
human infants, God-alienated or not, for having human needs. Sins
penalty refers not to the fact of human need but to its dispiriting
quality. If we live largely unconsciously, as unthinking servants to
our appetites, we will tend not to notice that life in the flesh is always
shared, most fundamentally with God. If we start to notice our
not noticing, then it may seem as if we now know what God cannot
possibly know: the terrible emptiness of sin, absolute aloneness. On
the one hand, Augustine is disposed to turn that emptiness into a
source of special human responsibility, individual and collective: it is
all of us in Adam who turn from God and choose voluntarily to live
in a wasteland. God cannot share in this responsibility of ours, not
even as Jesusespecially not; such responsibility is the birthright
solely of Adams children, our badge of moral distinctiveness, grave
though it be. On the other hand, Augustine experiences his emptiness
as the place where he hears God call from afar. The history of his
flesh soon returns to him, like an unfulfilled promise. Augustine will
be tempted to ignore the promise and cling in his memory to his
moment out of time. This is understandable. Really to share the same
flesh with God, he would have to give up the special responsibility
that has defined for him both his guilt and his moral identity. And
how is that surrender not irresponsible?
Augustine does have a view, though never an entirely clear one,
to a different kind of responsibility. This kind is more a matter of
recognition than of willfulness, and it does not require him to trade
in his innocence for his identity. It begins to insinuate itself, in shades
of grey, in his labor of memory. Over time he works to remember the
God of his creation-peak experience differently: no longer his lifes
great interruption, a moment of unbirthing, this God will prove to be
the mother of his each and every moment. This is not just a change
70
of remembered object; it is a change in the nature of memory itself.
Simple recollection has now become a sacred act. Augustine mostly
resists the sanctification of his memory, confesses to his lack of
readiness. He would prefer, like most of us, to live in his own time, the
time that fits to measure, or at least seems to, when he is not thinking
much about it. The rest of time, alien and unbounded, washes over
him like a solvent and removes him, bit by bit, from himself. Why
sanctify that? He is honestly not sure why, but he begins to sense that
profane timethe time for which he is the measureis finally not
memorable. I conclude with a few thoughts about the will-defying
disquietude that frames his struggle to remember.
The emotion of time
Francisco Petrarca (Petrarch) was both a great humanist of the
Italian Renaissance and a lover of Augustine. While in the throes of
a spiritual crisis, Petrarch took a pocket-sized copy of the Confessions
with him to the top of Mount Ventoux in Southern France, opened
the book at random, and put his trust in providence. He was not
disappointed. The words he fell upon chastened his perspective on
worldly achievement and changed his life (conf. 10.8.15):
People travel to marvel at mountain peaks, great surging seas,
broad river falls, the oceans ambit, and the starry orband they
leave themselves behind.
Petrarch ends there, but Augustine rounds off the thought:
They dont marvel that when I was speaking of these things I was
not seeing them with my eyes. And yet I would not be speaking of
these things were I not seeing them in myself, as items of memory:
the peaks, waves, rivers, and stars, all of which I have seen before,
and the ocean, which I trust others to have seen. I was seeing them
as big as life, as if they were on the outside.
It is tempting to hear in Augustines sentiment, as Petrarch clearly
did even in the truncated version, an invitation to turn withinlike
any good Platonist wouldand discover there a world of great
wonder, power, and beauty, a world far surpassing the sensible.
71
But in the sentences that preface the passage quoted above,
Augustine is commenting on how impossible he finds it to keep track
of all the images that enter his head. He forms images in his mind of
whatever he sees or remembers having seen; he can even form an
image of what he has never seen if he has some way of proceeding by
analogy. He can, for instance, imagine the ocean; having seen a big
seathe Mediterraneanhe begins with his image of that and then
imagines something much bigger. He is not suggesting in this context
that the image of a thing, being a mental expression, is more beauti-
ful than the thing itself. In any case it does not follow from what he
believes about beautythat it takes a mind to perceive itthat the
mind alone is beautiful. And certainly it would be implausible to
the point of bizarre for him to be claiming that his mental image of
the ocean is necessarily more awe-inspiring than the ocean itself. He
has, after all, never even seen the ocean. What he finds truly amazing
is the fact that his inner image-making factory is always out-doing
itself (conf. 10.8.15): Is the mind too narrow to encompass itself ?
Where is the part of it, then, that it does not grasp? Out of itself and
not in? How does the mind not grasp itself ? Many times I mull this
over in my amazement, and I am left stupefied.
If Augustine were one of those people who seek to be captivated by
material beauties, he might not have noticed or have been very
impressed by the chaos of his inner life and its out-of-kilter imagery.
When we see a thing, we do not for the most part take ourselves to be
seeing an image of the thing; we see the thing, whats right before us.
We take ourselves to be seeing an image of the thing only when we are
struck by the partiality of our seeing. Say that I am looking at a rose
of extraordinary beauty and delicacy; it is the jewel of my garden. For
a captivated moment or two, I fail to consider that from another angle
I may see the black spots that have been turning all my roses into
withered shadows of themselves. I look from all sides and see, to my
relief, that my beloved rose is spot-free. But I also realize, with the
spell of its immediate beauty broken, that my seeing has been partial
nonetheless. My rose does not exist only in the present moment. Like
any material being, it has a past that I can potentially recollect and a
future that I can more or less reasonably expect. At any given moment,
what I see is what I see at present, but the image of something materially
present always has a threefold aspecta blending, but not always a
harmonious one, of past, present, and future.
72
Augustine speaks, somewhat awkwardly, of a present of things past,
a present of things present, and a present of things future: a conjunc-
tion in the mind of memory, seeing, and expectation (conf. 11.20.26).
The unity of those three modes of apprehension depends on there
being a present (praesens) that is common to past, present, and future;
it is best thought of as a presencethat which is set before (prae)
awareness (sensus). It is characteristic of material things that they
are never entirely present in the present moment; partly they are
constituted by what they have been (their presence in the past) and
partly by what they will be (their presence in the future). It is a huge
question for Augustine whether the minds image of a thing ever rises
to the level of complete awareness of what the thing is. There may be
no single image that can deliver the requisite presence.
Now of course the mind is not just in the business of getting to
know material things. There are items of knowledge that have no
truck with images, none at all; they just show up in mental space,
whole and as they essentially are, and the mind, itself imageless,
immediately knows its like. Items in pure geometry and mathematics
fall into this category. Consider the difference, says Augustine
(conf. 10.12.19), between the lines in an architectural drawing, thin
as a spiders thread but still seen with the bodys eye (carnis
oculus), and the lines that are perceived without the need of any
kind of physical representation; we see them on the inside (intus).
Similarly, Augustine continues, there is a big difference between a
number of things and a number, which is not in any way material.
I say the word, five, and count off five fingers; my young daughter,
hoping to learn her numbers, nods approvingly and does likewise.
If there is this big difference between a line in the mind and a line on
a page, a number in the mind and a finger count, then I cannot hope
to show her directly what an idea is. At best my physical gesticulations
may prompt her to recall what only the inner light of truth (interior
lux veritatis; mag. 12.40) can convey to her: the fullness of her inner
world. For the person lacking in self-awareness and glued to material
objects, Augustine has no argument, only pity (conf. 10.12.19): Let
him mock me as I speak of the minds things, the one who does not
see them; I feel for him mocking me.
It is tempting to Augustine to think of God as an immaterial entity,
more sublime than a bit of mathematics, but grasped in essentially
the same way: mind sees mind. In an early work, the Soliloquies, he
imagines having a conversation with his own reason, Ratio, who is
73
helping him into his knowledge of God and soul. He naively suggests
to Ratio that God is not knowable to him in way that spheres, lines,
and other ideal objects are. Ratio reassures him that he has over-
stated the difference (sol. 1.5.11): It is a given that you will relish
knowing God many times more than knowing these things, but the
dissimilarity is a matter of different objects, not of modes of under-
standing (rerum tamen, non intellectus dissimilitudine). This line of
thinking finally stalls out for him as the mind begins to look, well,
too immortaleternally knowing and essentially untouched by a
bodily history of birth, aging, and death. Book 3 of the Soliloquies,
which was to be a proof that the mind is truly secure in its incorpo-
real and God-like point of view, never gets written. He has a brief go
at this proof in The Souls Immorality (imm. an.), a short study that
he wrote to remind himself to finish the Soliloquies, but clearly he
was not encouraged by the results (retr. 1.5.1): Mainly because of its
dense and abbreviated reasoning, this small book is obscureso
much so that it wears me out to read it, and I am scarcely able to
understand myself.
In a later work, where God has reemerged with greater sublimity,
Augustine is still banking on mind-to-mind correspondence, albeit
now by way of analogy. Begin with the idea that the mind, when not
unthinkingly confusing itself with material things, knows itself and
its own nature immediately. For what, asks Augustine rhetorically
(Trin. 10.7.10), is as present to cognition as the mind is, and what
is as present to mind as the mind itself ? Self-presence still has for
him a threefold aspect: the mind simultaneously recalls itself (past),
sees itself (present), and wills itself to be continued (future). Now
consider that even a triune mind with such perfect timing is but an
image (imago, but literally imageless) of true perfection. Here is
Augustine again (Trin. 15.22.43): The Trinity as it is in itselfthat
is one thing; the image of the Trinity in something elsethat is
another. By the time he ends his great work on the Trinity, it will
have become clear to him that his self-comprehension is necessarily
too puny to house Father, Son, and Spirit; the image can never con-
tain the source. And yet it is on the supposition that his mind can
contain itself and exist as a limited whole that he is able to model a
perfection greater than his own, an infinite whole. His idea of God
comes through and then transcends his idea of self.
In the Confessions, Augustine is amazed to discover that he does
not have a coherent idea of self, nothing that he can wrap his mind
74
around. At any given moment, he is witness to a sliver of himself, but
that sliver is constantly being reshaped and eroded by the great flow
of images that race through his present and pool into his past, where
they dwell in memory. When he speaks in awe of the great force of
memory (magna vis memoriae; conf .10.10.15), too great he adds
(magna nimis; conf. 10.10.15), he is not referring to his ability, not
very great at all, to retrieve images from his memory and convert
them into a self-conception; he is referring to his memorys silent
witness against all his solo efforts at self-conceiving. Either there is
always too much for him to recollect, too much experience to sort
out, or there is something deep in his memory, some great force,
that actively resists his drive for self-containment.
When he confesses, near the beginning of his meditation on
memory, to having traveled away from God and toward himself
a prodigals walk in the darkhis words are especially striking
given his sometime tendency to make a virtue of self-presence
(conf. 10.5.7):
Without a doubt we now look through a glass darkly and not yet
face to face, and because of this, for as long as I travel away from
you, I am more present to me than to you. But I do know this
about you, that you can in no way be undone. As for me, I do
not know which trails I can weather and which I cannot. I have
hope because you can be trusted: you do not let us be tried beyond
our ability to bear, but build an exit into the trial, so that we
can endure. Let me then confess to you what I know of me; let me
also confess what I do not know. For what I know of me I know
when you dawn on me, and what I do not know of me I do not
know until such time as my darkness is made high noon before
your gaze.
There is no suggestion here that Augustine is most a knower when his
mind is self-relating and he has access to an immediate, if limited,
form of knowing. On the contrary, he is looking for some distance to
open between his self-certainties and his lifes potential, a crack for
different light to come in. Darkness too. He seems, for now, to be
open to the coincidence of opposites, light and dark, spirit and flesh.
His inner darknessusually for him his dark love of fleshmay be,
for all he knows, high noon for God. What does he really know of
what God can illuminate? What does he know of himself ? The great
75
force of memory is there to remind him that he is, as a creature of
time, perpetually behind and ahead of himself: some of him is no
longer, some not yet. If he resolves in response to identify with a
mind that is distracted but never undone by the unfolding of material
things, then he will surely lose his awe for the force that deposits
him in time. Why care if he is not really there? Otherwise he gets all
the distance between him and himself that he could ever want. The
question is: what does he want?
Augustine assumes that time must be a good thing, being Gods
creation, but he finds time hard to love. It breaks up into a future that
is not yet, a past that is no longer, and a present that gets whittled
down to a pivot between two forms of non-being. Times one sliver
of being, the present time, is made to pass away; if the present never
passed, time would not be timeit would be eternity. It just does not
seem possible to Augustine to love something that exists only because
it tends not to (conf. 11.15.17). The mind that distends itself to
embrace a time-defined beloved tends also not to exist. So why isnt
the love of temporal things merely self-defeating? Augustine admits
that he has no sense of time beyond what his mind has managed to
embrace and contain. He seems determined, in fact, to measure time
in terms of his minds affection for time (conf. 11.27.36): Either time
is the affection, or I do not measure time. The irony of his ultimatum
lies in the fact that his mind cannot contain time. Time to the mind is
an emotion, and Augustines term for a mental affection, affectio
animi, can signal an emotiona move outwards. If Augustine contains
time in his mind, then his mind no longer contains itself. Once again
he is returned to the great force of memory.
It turns out that Augustine can no more resolve to love things
in time than he can resolve to exempt his mind from time and live
in eternity. The only issue to be resolved is whether God can love
temporal beings and not be undone. And that is up to God to resolve.
Augustine can only report on the effect that a divine resolution has
had on his affection (conf. 10.27.38):
Late I loved you, beauty so old and so new; I loved you late. And
look, you were within and I was without; and there I was seeking
you, where I shipwrecked my misshapen self on the beauties
of your making. You were with me and I was not with you; the
beauties which exist only if they exist in you kept me at a distance.
You called and shouted and finally shattered my deafness; you
76
were radiant, resplendentmy blindness you put to flight. You
were perfumed; I inhaled and gasp for you. I have taken my taste,
and now I feel hunger and thirst. You touched me, and I burn
for your peace.
Augustine gets returned to his senses. But it is easy to be misled
here, if we draw the wrong moral from his suggestion that God was
within him while he was on the outside, indulging his prodigal love
of misconstrued beauty. The bare implication, of course, is that
Augustine needs to be within himself to be with his source. True, he
cannot live forever in a wasteland of his own making, where he insists
on reducing his every act of love to an exercise in self-privation.
He needs to embrace his more substantial self and find God there,
once again dividing Augustine from himselfbut this time without
alienation. Unlikeness will have become natural and full of promise.
What we need to grasp, in order to grasp this, is that Augustines
awakened desire is for a beginning as well as a consummation.
He gestures to a shared life in the flesh, with God on the outside
and Augustine within. He gestures to a life lived in anticipation
of a birth.
77
CHAPTER THREE
SEX AND THE INFANCY OF DESIRE
The poet was a fool who wanted no conflict among us, gods or people.
Harmony needs low and high, as progeny needs man and woman.
Heraclitus (trans. Haxton)
Imagine that the self you call your own is really a union of two
selvesone higher, one lowerand that the relationship between
them is dodgy. Your higher self is looking to perfect its union with
something that is eternally perfect and perfectly good; it will think of
that more perfect union as its redemptive knowledge. Your lower self
is not terribly clear about what it wants, not being given to profound
self-reflection, but from the higher perspective, it looks to be trying
to perfect its union with its body, the thing it thinks of, quite precipi-
tously, as its essential form. You may be tempted, at this point in the
imaging, to style yourself as an onlooker, neither the one self nor the
other, but some third thing between. Consider the possibility that
there is no between here. Either you feel yourself being drawn up,
against the weight of habit, into an elevated desire, or you feel yourself
being weighted down, despite your noblest intent, by needy flesh.
You may feel yourself at times to be both selves at once, but there is
no issue from this coincidence other than heightened inner conflict.
When death comes, as it must, and soul is sundered from body, soul
either goes the way of decomposing flesh, as the lower self always
feared it would, or soul becomes liberated from flesh and the higher
self survives. Or perhaps I should say, more tentatively, that some
selfmaybe higher, maybe notsurvives death and decomposition.
Bear with me as I invite you to replay the imagining in an altered
key. You are the postmortem self, soul without body. Do you have
any reason to want your body back and with it the life that left you
78
divided between a higher and lower self ? This way of putting the
question assumes, of course, that your postmortem self is your higher
self. If it were your lower, you would be wanting your body back
because you persist in wanting to perfect yourself in bodily terms
you see no alternative. Meanwhile your higher self, having also
survived your bodys demise, is still struggling to break from you or,
more precisely, from your obsession with composed (and therefore
decomposable) unities. Basically this is the same imagining as before.
The postmortem framing is irrelevant. The new possibility I want
you to consider is that your higher self conjoins with your lower,
body-oriented self out of higher purpose and desire and not because of
some unaccountable force that holds opposites together. But I should
not be asking you to be imagining a postmortem, disembodied life.
Imaging the life that you have now is challenging enough. So return
to those two selves of yours, still in a dodgy relationship, but now
defined as much by mutual attraction as by repulsion.
Your higher self loves your lower self. And out of love it wants
to teach that self a better way, much as a parent, with reserves
of patience, commits to educating its slow-to-learn child. It takes
little imagination to live within the limits of a narrow self-love.
We commonly think of such a life as selfishas if it were peculiarly
revelatory of self. In fact there is no non-circular way to identify the
self in selfishness. You say that you are your body and your body
alone, that you feel only its pains and pleasures. How do you know
which body is yours? Well, it is the body whose pains and pleasures
you most directly feel. We are sufficiently familiar with our lower
selves not to be especially bothered by the circularity of such reason-
ing. We should be careful about becoming overly familiar. Do you
really want to claim that you never feel what others feel? That all
you ever sense is, in effect, one body, variously stimulated? Certainly
you can commit to this way of thinking and remain consistent with
the self you have imagined your body to be, but now you risk
not noticing how little you have imagined. Perhaps you would do
better to admit how your capacity to love can sometimes make
it hard for you to know which body claims you most. This is a diffi-
culty that your selfish lower self can scarcely appreciate apart from a
higher inspiration.
So far I have given you only a condescending higher self to imagine.
This self stoops down from a sublime height and tries to instill
its constant desirefor eternal thingsinto the consciousness of its
79
lower counterpart. The inspiration begins to take effect when the
lower self no longer feels the need to translate all love into self-love.
To get a sense of what I mean by this, think of the two fundamentally
different ways in which the neighbor-love commandthe command
to love your neighbor as yourselfcan be rendered. In one you begin
with your own self-love, bring it into focus, and then extend it to
a self-image, your neighbor, now your satellite self. In the other
the neighbor is simply and directly the self to be loved. There is
no transfer or extension of a (supposedly) more basic self-love.
If you are a lower self who can manage neighbor-love along the
lines of the second rendering, then your condescending higher self is
moderately pleased. You know that you have it within you not to
confuse your self with your body; now you just need to learn how not
to confuse it with the body of someone else. Your higher self will
want to return you to your self-love, but at a greater depthwhere
you start to realize that you are no more your body than you are your
neighbors body.
I am not going to go into this further lesson of the higher self
(which I confess I have never learned); instead I am going to give
you a higher self that descends rather than condescends and weds
its love to flesh. Its story goes something like this. Your higher self
loves you, not because it loves itself in you (neighbor-love, first
rendering), but because you are the self that it loves (neighbor-love,
second rendering). Whenever you realize that love is not always
transferred self-love, the lower part of you ascends and the higher
part descends. This contrary motion makes for an uneasy incarnation.
Your lower self, in ascending, is loving bodies other than its own, and
your higher self, in descending, is materializing the self that it loves.
In place of a presumptive unity of self with self, we get distention:
the stretch of a self wanting both to self-surrender and to take root.
And it is no longer clear, if it ever really was, which impulse is higher
and which not.
Plotinus, who, along with Paul, does most to shape Augustines
sense of the ambiguities of spirit, has been the background inspiration
for my opening imaginary. In his tractate on souls descent into body
(enn. 4.8)an early treatise and likely well known to Augustine
Plotinus reflects on his many ecstatic experiences, when his soul
has left his body and reached to its ultimate source, and wonders why,
each and every time, he ends up back in his body. There seems to
be no reason for his soul to prefer beautiful bodies, which are all
80
shadowy things, barely able to hold a form, to the abundance of the
One, which floods the mind with beauty and fixes soul in intellect.
The word soul (
) needs to be used advisedly here. Plotinus lets

us refer, in a rough and ready way, to individual souls that animate
bodies. In this manner, I can talk about my soul, you yours. But
if this is the only way we can think to talk about soul, then we
will have forgotten ourselves and are bound for sorrow. Soul is
more fundamentally All-Soul (
), a unified form of divine

intellect and the administrator of all animation in the sensed world.
As reflections of All-Soul, individually ensouled beings are disposed
both to crave higher knowledge (an ecstatic endeavor) and to care
for material things (a mundane undertaking). In the All-Soul,
knowledge and nurture are perfectly wed; in individual souls the
caring impulse mysteriously outpaces the knowing impulse, to the
benefit of neither. I will end up, while oblivious of my higher nature,
serving an ever narrowing vision of myselffrom globe, to country,
to family, to body, to body-image. My footloose soul will have unac-
countably traded the bliss of divine communion for a self-defeating
life of separateness.
The account that Plotinus offers of why soul descends into body
(and I am thinking primarily of enn. 4.8.4) is less explanatory than it
seems. Suppose that I try to use it as an explanation for my lifes
confusions. Basically I am being told that I get into trouble when
I think I know better than my higher self how to run my life. I am
wrong when I think this way, of course, and my adolescent soul
inevitably succumbs to its own arrogance (
) and starts to
look pathetically needy. My arrogance doubtless explains my fall, but
what explains my arrogance? If my soul proceeds from the All-Soul,
then I have never not known the boon of life in my fathers house
(i.e., life in the Divine Intellect, u
~
, to which the maternal All-Soul
eternally clings). I have no motive to go prodigal.
But this way of putting the problem is misleading. I do not exist as
a lower self, struggling to regain its higher perspective, until I have
left my fathers house, divided my soul against itself, and suffered
privation. If there were a good explanation for why I do this, I would
not be able to understand it, not while I lived divided. Only from my
original oneness could I understand, but from there, presumably,
I would have no need of an explanation. My existence in both spirit
and flesh would feel like oneness.
81
When Plotinus wonders why his soul returns to his body, having
regained its oneness, he is not preparing us to think that he is the sort
of teacher who obsessively refuses the fruits of his own spiritual
labor. If his soul descends, that can only be because there is no neces-
sary fracture of soul in such descent. But those of us who confuse
incarnation with spirits conflict with flesh still have work to do. The
short story that Plotinus tells us about obsessiveness, disguised as
soul, discloses in general terms the nature of the work. To take our
place in things, we must learn how to ascend and leave our fictions of
soul and body behind us.
While there are certainly echoes of Plotinus in Augustine (who is
likewise apt to question, without condemning, souls love of body),
Augustine tends to invert the Plotinian itinerary. Plotinus ascends in
order to descend and bring light into a cave of ignorance, where
many live unlike themselves. Augustine tells his soul (conf. 4.12.19),
Descend, so that you may ascend, and ascend to God. Take ascent
and descent in this context to refer to orientations of attention.
If you are ascending, you are paying less and less attention to how
you have loved the body, and your first step up is not away from your
attraction to physical beauty (here it is always possible for one body
to stand in for another) but from your love of somebody in particular.
The presumption of ascent is that you cannot think of love as your
desire to preserve or perfect a body and truly understand what it is
that makes you love. You need distance from your desire. The path
of descent, from some peak of abstracted awareness all the way
down into the depths of a particularized love, is no simple reversal of
ascent. Think of the climatic moment of Augustines interiorized
ascent from carnal affection to love of God (conf. 7.17.23): at the
very moment he makes the heady discovery that he is already the
lover he wants to be (iam te amabam), his old habit of desiring flesh
grabs him by the soul and drags him back down to a shadowy place
part matter, part illusion. His journey can be considered a descent
and not a fall from grace when he is able to take his best love with
him into the shadows and find all of his family there, his humanity
root and branch; then his love of flesh will be entirely voluntary, a
gift of spirit.
When I say that Augustine is, spiritually speaking, more of a
descender than a climber, I do not mean to suggest that he has a
cheerier attitude toward the body and its needs than does Plotinus.
82
Both men believe that a spiritual aspiration styled as a bodily
appetite is bad news. If they are right, you cannot trust your desire
for God nor I my hankering after the One if we are both simply
redirecting a lower form of desireas in scratching an itch, releasing
a tension, quieting a hunger, or even vying for glorytoward an
allegedly more sublime object. It is more the form of our desire that
has to change. On that score Augustine and Plotinus supply us with
different models of success. Plotinus gives us no reason to doubt his
ascending. Many times he has left his body to be with the One; many
times he has returneduntil all the little deaths finally give way to
the big one. With Augustine matters are less clear. Is the ascent he
describes in book 7 of the Confessions an honest, all-the-way-to-God
ascent, the peak of wisdom?
Considering that his flesh-bound habit is still able to reach him at
his highest, most liberated height, I suspect not. Plotinus is puzzled,
much as any theorist would be, by his souls desire for his body;
he inquires about it from a place of equanimity within himself.
Augustine seems to have no such place. His post-ascent feelings of
self-division, which reach a fever-pitch in book 8, suggest that he
wears his carnal desires close to his heart. They do not fade away or
conform to spirit over the course of a contemplative ascesis; instead
they bide their time and wait, like so many hungry stowaways,
to plead exigency. His souls ascent partially illuminates for him
his souls native love of God; mostly it shows him the unfinished
business of his incarnation. As this business, he learns from Paul, is
fundamentally Gods business, Augustine cannot fairly claim to have
been with God and not with himself, flesh and all. In that regard, the
real success of his ascent lies in its check on his presumption.
Augustines turn to Paul, which he details for us near the end of
book 7, is less his rejection of Plotinus than his recognition that Paul,
for him a Platonist manqu, is in the better position to be his guide to
Gods descentthe divine way into the flesh. This may be because, to
follow his suggestion in book 7, that Paul shows more humility in his
person than a self-described Platonist does, or, more to the point,
that his texts do. Augustine fails to find in Platonist literature (e.g.,
the Enneads) any comparable mention of a troubled spirit, a contrite
heart, tears of confession, a peoples salvation, Christs sacrifice,
or the pouring forth of his Holy Spirit, the cup of our salvation
(poculum pretii nostri; conf. 7.21.27). But however the contest of
humility works out (I am loathe to entertain it), I think that there is
83
a deeper, less ad hominem, reason for Augustines Pauline sensibilities.
Paul allows Augustine to play out Plotinian ambiguities of spirit
flesh fleeing, flesh affirmingas a drama of two Adams, two paradigms
of the human. The first Adam, apparently motherless, values his tie
to his partner, the woman, over his obedience to his father in heaven;
the second Adam, born of woman but begotten of that same father,
remains obedient and redeems for the first Adams descendents the
promise of deathless flesh. For someone whose ties to women remain
achingly close to his aspirations for spiritual transcendence, Pauls
invitation to spiritualize mortal flesh will seem nearly irresistible. But
it is also true that the disparity between mother-born flesh, bound to
die, and father-restored flesh, preserved for heaven, tugs at the seams
of Augustines theology and threatens to undo its coherence.
Being too inventive a theologian to borrow, Augustine is finally no
more Plotinian in his use of Plotinus than he is Pauline in his use of
Paul, and his amalgam of those two (really disparate) inspirations is
the further expression of his own genius. That genius takes him,
among other places, to his notorious doctrine of original sin, praised
by some as a sine qua non of the Christian faith, condemned by
others as a thinly veiled piece of misogyny. No one disputes the
centrality of the doctrine to Augustines theology. My own view is
that the doctrine suffers from its association with an overly simplified
mythology. The simplification is not Augustines. I look to his more
complex story and some of its implicationsespecially for his sense
of his own conversionin what follows.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF SIN
Grace and original guilt
Augustines doctrine of original sin takes in two, intimately related
concerns with origin: there is the question of what first moves human
beings, made to love God, to fragment that love and live partial,
death-haunted lives; and then there is the further questioncall
it the genetic questionof how a choice becomes an inheritance.
In Augustines parsing of these questions of origination, Adam and
Eve, our ancestral parents, have no inherited disposition to sin but
choose to sin anyway (a mystery of psychology), and we, who are
their descendents, enter life disposed to sin and choose a better
life only when divinely aided to do so (a mystery both of grace
84
and genetics). Augustine never would have had a distinctively genetic
question to face had he been willing to allegorize his Adam and Eve,
leaving them to represent universal aspects of soul. Then he would
have had only a single mystery to fathom: the souls choice, against
its better wisdom, of an imperfect love. His first commentary on
Genesis, directed against the crude literalisms of the Manichees, is
in fact mostly allegorical, and there he tries out the notion of an
originally incorporeal Adam and Eve (Gn. adv. Man. 1.19.30). But
the notion never sits well with him.
Human beings, he comes to believe, have from the beginning been
composites of spirit and flesh; they are not souls masquerading in
bodies or yoked to the body as if to some dispensable and altogether
temporary contrivance. Adam and Eve are to Augustine flesh and
blood originals; they have to have sex in order to reproduce, and their
garden life in Eden, however brief and dream-like (it was before they
had children), is a part of human history. We can no longer retrieve
that part. The place where it took place is inaccessible to us, being
under angelic guard (Gen. 3:24), and even if we could get to it, we
would be fundamentally unlike the people who once lived there.
Adam and Eve were given the wisdom to know how and why not to
sin; we have inherited, by contrast, a beginning in ignorance and
mortal toil (lib. arb. 3.20.55). It would not be equitable, Augustine
contends, for the first couple, once having sinned, then to be able to
produce enlightened children, endowed with forfeited wisdom. Our
hobbled start in life is thus part of sins dread penalty (lib. arb. 3.19.54),
and although Augustine is not wholly clear about this point, it seems
primarily a penalty visited upon our original parents that we, their
children, can never naturally surpass them. When he imagines us
complaining that our lot is too hard and grossly unfair, he concedes
that we would have a point were it not true that we have recourse to
divine aid and need only ask to receive its benefit (lib. arb. 3.19.53):
You are not at fault because you dont hold your wounded parts
together, but because you disregard the one willing to heal them.
Augustine in any case does not rush to the view that we rightly
bear the guilt of someone elses past, even if that someone is a close
relative. He knows the difference between a sexually transmitted dis-
ease and a corrupted household. The first is an affair of the flesh, at
least in so far as the mechanism of transmission is at issue. I may will
to have sex, but my newborn does not will (cannot in fact will) to
catch the disease that carries through my act. The second is a matter
85
of soul. I may model sin to my growing child, but my sin transfers
only to the degree that my child freely consents to ita tricky
judgment, but we know what to look for: the emergence in the child
of free will, liberum arbitrium. The regulating intuition in both
cases is that spirit, not flesh, is the realm of freedom, and thus spirit,
unlike flesh, is subject only to self-willed corruption. It proves to be a
devilishly hard intuition for an embodied spirit, like a human being,
to sustain with any consistency, but Augustine never rejects it
outright. It comes then as a rather discordant moment in his theol-
ogy when he first feels compelled to speak of guilt (originali reatu;
Simpl. 1.2.20) as an involuntarily human inheritance, making the
whole race into a birthed lump of sin-infected flesh (massa peccati;
Simpl. 1.2.16). Now we can start worrying about which part of hell
houses unbaptized infantsAugustine thinks the mildest (mitissima;
pecc. mer. 1.16.21).
What changes most fundamentally for him is his sense of divine
parenting. It thickens as he struggles to interpret Pauls claims about
electionespecially the sheer gratuity of itin Romans 9 (Simpl. 1.2).
Augustine starts to think that God doesnt wait for Jacob or for any
favored son and daughter to find the internal wherewithal to come to
a sober self-assessment and petition for help. It is not the petition
that occasions the parenting but the parenting that stirs in a person,
sooner or later, the virtue of faithtrust that the God of life is still
out there and even within. The logic of such parenting defies the
reassuring division of labor between the soul that makes choices and
the body that has impulses. In this life we are never fully responsible
beings, passing judgment on our childish impulses from a place of
sublime maturity; we enter the kingdom of heaven as children, still
under the watch and nurture of God. When Augustine considers how
good people fall and better people emerge from a place of fallenness
(he has in mind Pauls history as a persecutor), he comes to what
he believes is the only possible conclusion: that God elects wills
(voluntates eligantur; Simpl. 1.2.22)whole persons and not just
their piecemeal psychologies. But the will itself, he adds, is not
able to be moved in the slightest unless something happens to delight
and stir the mind.
It is worth pausing to consider what he means by this. Is grace a
providentially designed offering of beauty that triggers a persons
latent disposition to become good, even saintly? We can imagine that
Saul the persecutor is deep down the Paul that loves Jesus and fights
86
the good fight. We can further imagine that Paul takes over from
Sauldeep self replacing surface personaonly when Saul is
suddenly blinded by a light from heaven and one of his former
enemies lays hands upon him, helpless, and removes the scales from
his eyes (Acts 9:119). The mind is stirred; the heart is delighted.
The problem with this picture is that it leaves the deep self largely out
of the work of grace. This is a self to be unearthed but not created
ex nihilo; it enters the picture already in place, albeit buried at first.
This wont do. Augustine no longer thinks of election as being based
on a prior good, even a good as modest as an unexpressed disposition
for some virtue; he explicitly rejects faith-based elections. Anyone
who misses this point in his responses to Simplician need only wade
a little into his anti-Pelagian writings to get the message. But the
converse picture, suggested by his late-in-life reflections on predesti-
nation and perseverance (persev.; praed. sanct.; both written c. 428), is
not so helpful either. Suppose that God creates absolutely everything
about Pauls saintliness: his saintly predisposition (hidden at first),
his altered self-awareness, his persistence in his saintly life. Where
did Saul come from? To answer that kind of question, Augustine
thickens our Adamic parentage, nearly to the degree that he has
thickened grace. We end up with competing paternities: one father,
partnerless, creates autonomously; the other father prefers to create
with his partner, flesh of his flesh, even at the cost of his spirit
(cf. Gen. 3:6: she gave to her man, and he ate.). The resolution of
this conflict is the work of gracenot the creation of unmixed good-
ness out of an unresisting void, but the miraculous emergence of
something distinctively human out of a disposition, still of radically
uncertain origin, to resist divine life.
We are back to the one great mystery of sins motive. What moves
Adam, or better, what moves us, to turn love of flesh into a prison-
house of spirit? The genetic mystery of inherited guilt becomes a
false issue for Augustine once he relocates the wayward Adam to the
graced soul and reduces him there to a lingering resistanceinternal
to the psyche but not inherited. Now we get saints with troubled
histories and an allegorical Adam. Augustines attempt to hold onto
a literal Adam, a man of ancient history, fails here. Adam loses
his letter the moment he becomes a perverse spirit. From then on
he has only an accidental connection to the body that would have
been, from a literal point of view, his own. His sinand I use the
87
possessive pronoun very looselyis no more intimately tied to one
body than another. The same logic holds for the rest of us sinners.
Solidarity in sin is not a context for differentiating flesh. Augustine
is right to speak of humanity as an undifferentiated mass (massa)
and not as a collection of individuals whenever sin is being made
out to be a procreative principle. But he is wrong, and wrong by
virtue of his own best insights, when he invokes inherited guilt to
define an alternative, albeit damned, genealogy of the humanas
this is to attribute to sin precisely the procreative, life-extending
power that it lacks.
Adam, Eve, and the angels
Lets take a closer look at Adams sin. I refer to Adam as decoupled
from Eve and not to their collective enterprise of sin because it is
Adam alone, claims Augustine, who is of a mind to sin. His Eve,
the sensualist of the couple, feels her way unthinkingly into sins
deception. When the cunning serpent suggests to her that knowledge
is life, she begins to see the tree in the middle of the garden differ-
ently. Augustine presumes that she is looking at the forbidden tree
of knowledge (Gen. 2:17), but the Genesis text is vague about this,
perhaps deliberately. The tree, life or knowledge, has become for her
a lust to the eyes and so she took of its fruit and ate (Gen. 3:6).
Lust is not very thoughtful. Augustines Adam thinks about the
stakes when Eve offers him a bite from her piece of fruit, and for
various unstated reasonswhich Augustine will venture to statehe
decides to bite.
Augustine cites Paul as his authority for emphasizing gender roles
in the drama of the first sin: Adam plays the soberly self-aware part;
Eve gets to be seduced. Adam was not led astray, Augustine writes,
paraphrasing Paul (1 Tim. 2:14; civ. Dei 14.11), but his woman was.
While there is no way to remove the taint of sexism from a differen-
tiation that tends to leave men with minds and women with bodies,
Augustine is not entirely crude about its application. He proceeds on
the assumption that male and female denote inalienable aspects of
every single human being. But every single human being is also, from
a more strictly corporeal point of view, either male or female.
One place where the complexity of his ambidextrous soul is
conspicuously on display is book 12 of The Trinity, where Augustines
88
main business is to discredit the notion that a family trianglefather,
mother, and sonprovides an apt image of Gods triune way of
being. When God declares in Genesis 1:26, Let us make a human
in our image, Augustine takes the use of the first-person plural to
indicate a Trinitarian imperative: this is God speaking to God as
Father, Son, and Spirit. It follows for him that the human image
of God has to be triunethree elements, perfectly coordinated. The
next verse is going to test his assumptions about the imago Dei
(Gen. 1:27): And God created the human in his image, in the image
of God He created him, male and female He created them. To keep
this verse from implying that Gods image is duplex, male and female,
Augustine has to insert a full stop where I have put, following Robert
Alters translation, the second comma. God creates humankind in
the divine image. Period. With the image fully in place, Gods next
move is to create sexual difference.
If this is the right way to punctuate the verseand Augustine seems
to think that it is (Trin. 12.6.6)then sexual difference is excluded
from the human image of God: it is either extrinsic to it, like a veil
of clothing, or a distortion, like some disease. But Augustine is not
anxious to claim either of those possibilities, for he still thinks
of sexual difference as an originally human good and so part of
even our idealized humanity. The problem he has given himself,
when it comes to squaring image and reality, is basically this: he does
not want God to have to stoop to a body-image, much less a
gendered one, but nor does he want, in his ascendant self-image,
to have to hate the flesh.
His solutionif we want to call it thatis to look for a suitably
etherealized way to admit a feminine concern for the body into his
Trinitarian economy. He lands on the expedient of casting knowl-
edge of earthly things (scientia) as female and knowledge of eternal
things (sapientia, often translated as wisdom) as male. Our minds are
male, so to speak, when we are directly contemplating God, the one
essentially eternal being; they are female when we cling to Gods
ideas (aeternis rationibus; Trin. 12.7.12) and use them to stabilize our
otherwise chaotic perceptions of things in time. These are not equally
lofty forms of knowing in Augustines eyes. Only one in fact makes it
into the image of God; the other, while dependent on contemplation
for its ideas, is oriented less to God than to care and concern for the
body (though not necessarily ones own). Augustine invokes a hard
saying from Paul to symbolize the difference between the two forms
89
of knowing (1 Cor. 11:7; Trin. 12.7.9): Man ought not cover his
head, for he is the image and glory of God. But woman is the glory
of man. Since he is confident that Paul is not fool enough to be
saying that flesh-and-blood women look less like an incorporeal
God than flesh-and-blood men do, he is happy here not to be so
literal-minded: the saying really means, he surmises, that we are
closer to God when our minds are freed from bodily cares. But
why imagine that woman is an apt symbol for a mind more laden?
Augustine leaves it at this (Trin. 12.7.12): It is because she differs
sexually (sexu corporis) from man that woman could suitably sym-
bolize through her bodys veil (in eius corporali velamento) the part of
reason that gets diverted to time-management.
I take it that two things are being veiled in Augustines figuration
(via Paul) of woman. One is the purely contemplative orientation
of the mind, of which men and women, he thinks, are both equally
capable; the other is what makes a woman physically a womannot
her head, but her sexuality, which affords her, for a time, the capacity
to double life (or more than double it) from within. She is most naturally
a time-manageror really a time-giverwhen she is bearing and
raising her children.
If we keep in mind the literal basis of Augustines figuration, we
will be less likely to think of rerouted contemplation, from God
to flesh, as an exercise in selfishness. I suppose that a mothers love
for her child can be selfish if it amounts to no more than transferred
self-love, but it is perverse to insist on that possibility. Sometimes a
mother just loves her child, and, of course, it is not only mothers
who are capable of love. They are just the ones who most obviously
suggest the beloveds origination in the body. If Augustine means to
cut out the care of temporary things, like children, from his image of
God, then he risks turning the body-contempt of pure contemplation
into a form of selfishness. My body, after all, is not just for me to use;
it is sometimes quite naturally put to the service of others, whom
I call, non-possessively, my own. But Augustine does not mean
to exclude care of the body from the divine image; he means to
subordinate the knowledge that goes into this care to a contempla-
tive ideal. Here is where matters get even more complicatedand
perhaps confused.
Consider the perfectly ordered mind: the sublimely male part,
though mainly in love with eternity, condescends to his preoccupied
but still obedient partner and lends her access to eternal ideas.
90
She ascends part of the way to him, in that her obedience to him
renders her contemplative; he descends part of the way to her, in that
his care for her renders him practical. If we could imagine their
perfect place of meeting, where difference is without alienation
and where duality is too generous not to be three, we may yet get to
the human image of the triune God that Augustine, throughout
the second half of The Trinity, so tirelessly seeks. But he would
not expect us to be able to do that and still be thinking in terms of
sexual difference. By the end of book 12, he has definitely come to
think of the trinity of man, woman, and child as the image of a lower
form of consciousness, too caught up with the things of the outer
man (hominis exterioris; Trin. 12.15.25) to count as sublimely human.
Augustine has a hard time imagining how the perfectly ordered mind
can busy itself with mortal things without first having to compro-
mise (and so in some sense reject) its enjoyment of God. Or to
rephrase his difficulty in the language of Genesis: why does Adam
even want a partner? Shouldnt life with God be enough? And yet it
is God himself who says (Gen. 2:18): It is not good for the human
to be alone.
It is a striking feature of Augustines reading of the Genesis myth
that his Eve is much the same before and after her transgression.
True, she is definitively mortal only afterwards, but her peculiar
form of sentience, though not easy to describe, remains constant.
Augustine politely rejects the notion, coming to him from respected
defenders of the Catholic faith, that Eve embodies animation that is
as much animal as human (Trin. 12.13.20, but cf. Gn. adv. Man.
2.11.15). He prefers to keep his Eve distinctively human. She seems
to represent for him a reasoning persons desire for immortality, for
fuller life, but before reason has put a final form to that desire. If a
form-bestowing mind can be conceived to have an original tie to a
formless depth, then Eve, who, for Augustine, is more moved than
mover, is the pathos of that depth. Her one initiative is to offer her
partner, the man, a share in her experience.
When Augustine considers Adams motives for wanting to preserve
his connection to the woman, he presents us with a man moved by
pride and pity to save the partner who is, quite literally, a part of him
(Gen. 2:22). She needs saving, Adam assumes, because she is, as
the sole transgressor, too much on her own, and she would wither
away without his care (Gn. litt. 11.42.59). He takes pity on her and
condescends to join her in transgression, knowing full well that he is,
91
by disobeying, inviting death into his life (Gen. 2:17): From the tree
of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you
eat from it, God warns Adam, you are doomed to die. Adam
is from first breath a knowledgeable man, but being, as Augustine
puts it, unschooled in divine severity (inexpertus divinae severitatis;
civ. Dei 14.11), he still has much to learn about Gods judgment.
When he has to face that judgment directly, he becomes evasive.
Augustine quotes him trying to foist his responsibility unto the
woman and implicitly unto God (Gen. 3:12, translating from
Augustines Latin in civ. Dei 14.11): The woman whom you gave
to be with me, she gave to me, and I ate.
Augustine assumes an Adam who should have known better;
otherwise the difficulty of Adams life with the woman, lived outside
a protected garden and in the wilderness of human history, will
seem unjustat best a case of parental neglect, at worse evidence of
overt cruelty on Gods part. But the crucial issue of just how deep
Augustine takes Adams knowledge to run proves terribly hard to
resolve. What does Augustines Adam really know, his evasions aside,
about his own nature, his connection to the woman, his God?
Before Augustine gets around to discussing the human fall in City
of God, a good chunk of which is devoted to Genesis exegesis, he
takes up the case of angels and tries to account for why, at a time out
of time, some angels, but not others, broke from the celestial chorus of
divine praise, lost their spirit-tie to God, and morphed into agents
of ignorance and confusioni.e., into demons (civ. Dei 11.11, 11.33).
At first he entertains the shaky hypothesis that the fallen angels,
before falling, knew happiness with God but lacked the knowledge of
whether they would forever endure in that happiness (civ. Dei 11.13).
Their counterparts, the good angels, may have also lacked that
knowledge, but they kept the faith. Alternately, these angels were, for
some reason, gifted from the beginning with better knowledge. Either
way, Augustine recognizes that he is close to giving uncertain angels
a good motive for falling. If they cannot count on themselves or
on God to be forever good, they may well be moved to seek security
apart from their bond to Godalthough there is, as it turns out,
no security there. Augustines more considered opinion of the matter
leaves him with two firm convictions and no better theory (civ.
Dei 11.12, 12.6): he is convinced that no angel, no thinking being of
any sort, can reasonably reject God out of a sense of lacking some
good; he is equally convinced that the angels who are now in heaven
92
have no fear of one day rejecting God without reason. The earth-
born humans who are destined to join them have hope, his faith tells
him, for the same security.
Between an angel and an Adam there is considerable difference.
The angel lacks an original connection to flesh, knows nothing of
fleshs parting and partnering, has no desire for mortal things. The
angel that unaccountably sins turns from God and enters into a dark
place of spirit, a place emptied of life and light. Augustine thinks of
it as a second death (mors secunda; civ. Dei 13.1)not souls loss of
body but spirits loss of God. Although the human experience of sin
has as much or more to do with the first kind of death, Augustine
styles the angelic fall as the prequel to the human drama: know how
an angel sins and you how an Adam does it as well. Augustines
emphasis here is on the stupidly self-aggrandizing impulse behind sin
(civ. Dei 14.13, cf. 12.6). Adam has from God whatever he needs to be
or become his desired self, and so does an angelic spirit, poised in
heaven for a fall. When Adam and the angel who goes before him fall
(feel free here to think of Satan), they begin to chase after a self they
assume is more theirs than Godsas if God were the sort of creator
to begrudge them their distinctive selves. They will chase after that
self forever, never quite dying a second death. No originally living
being loses the light of God entirely, but it is possible, Augustine
believes, to take that light on a path of endlessly diminishing returns.
Once on that path, there is no way off itunless God intervenes.
Augustine does not expect God to intervene on behalf of Satan or
any of the less famous demons; he faults Origen, perhaps the greatest
theologian of the Greek East, for holding to universal redemption,
Gods love supposedly conquering all (civ. Dei 21.17). On this point
he is not simply following Catholic dogma; he is sticking to his own
logic of sinthe logic of absurdity. Demons do not sin because they
succumb to an illusion of greater life, richer selfhood; they succumb
to that illusion because they sin. It is the absurdity of their choice for
privation over plenitude that moves them to concoct an illusion and
follow it to hell. Apparently demons cannot bring themselves to
believe that at bottom they crave privation; they have to believe some-
thing else. But even were they to be properly disillusioned (Origen
imagines a cathartic hell), they would still have that absurd will to sin.
The environment of choice is irrelevant. Return them to heaven or
leave them in hell; their spirits remain tentative and fail to cling to
God. When Augustine goes on to insist that the holy angels, having
93
avoided a fall, become eternal clingers, he is changing the subject, not
describing a transformation.
He is also changing the subject, but more deliberately, when he
shifts from an angel to an Adam in his discussion of original sin.
Augustines Adam may seem at first absurdly demon-like in his
decision to reject the peace and plenitude of Eden and follow his
partner into sin (civ. Dei 14.10). But unlike a demon, Adam can be
redeemed by a vision of divine flesh, gracefully rendereda vision
that he needs to put on (cf. conf. 8.12.29). It matters both to his
sin and to his redemption that Adam is as much a creature of earth
(the Hebrew meaning of adam) as a son of heaven. When he is parted
from his original flesh, he feels ecstatic (Gen. 2:23): This one at
last, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. Later he will feel
vulnerable, her too (Gen. 3:7): They knew they were naked, and
they sewed fig leaves and made themselves loincloths. The capacity
of flesh to join and part from flesh is a source of both ecstasy and
vulnerability in human life; to know this and not shrink is to stretch
into adulthood. Imagine an Adam who shrinks after a taste of know-
ing and resolves to live as if his flesh really were internally contained.
Let his motivation be some combination of fear, faithlessness, and
arrogance (but mostly the faithlessness). He will have cut himself off
both from God, the breath of his breath, and from the woman, the
ecstasy of his flesh.
The womans role in Adams crisis is ambiguous. Is she his
co-conspirator in a crime against life, luring him to pit flesh against
spirit? Or is she an agent of creation, inviting him to bring his share
of spirit knowingly into flesh? Is she, in other words, taking Adam
into his incarnation or moving him out of it? Can the answer sanely
be both? She first enters the story when God puts Adam into a deep
slumber, draws out one of his ribs, and fashions a whole from a part
(Gen. 2:2122). He awakens to find that he is both less and more
than himself: he is a man related to a woman. She is bone of his
bones, flesh of his flesh. That suggests either the most intimate of
sexual intimacies or a mothers birthing of her son. The knowledge
that Adam is being offered should help him sort out the difference.
But something clearly goes wrong. Perhaps he takes too much to
himself what he is mainly supposed to receive and care for. No son
of God, after all, is ever born in Eden. That birthing has to wait,
according to Augustines faith, for a labor in time and history, where
partialities are inescapable.
94
Augustine has trouble including woman in his image of the Trinity
because she represents for him the love that exceeds itself and so
leaves its recipient ecstaticallybut also vulnerablyself-divided.
Meanwhile God on high is supposed to be perfectly self-related and
internally unaffected by his outreach to flesh. I am not suggesting
that Augustine ought to have embraced a self-divided God; there
are volumes of complaint to be lodged against such a notion. I am
pointing out that the original sin of his Eve is far from obvious.
Her taste of knowledgea consuming that quickly becomes an
offeringtests the law of divine desire. But does she violate it?
Augustine evidently thinks so (Trin. 12.12.18), but he is the one
who makes Adam out to be the only consensual partner to sin. The
womans offer to her partner of a knowing share in her life is an act
that is either prior to sin or beyond it. Her motives, unlike Adams,
are hard to write off as veiled self-aggrandizement. Indeed she
suggests through her offering the procreative alternative to sin:
in place of self-consuming desire, we get the divine mystery of
perfection without containment. Eve, the mother of all that lives
(Gen. 3:20), aims to create not only with her partner, but also beyond
himand herself. Her mediation of divine knowing is to bring even
death, or separation from lifes source, into lifes compass. If any of
this can be believed, then the idea of a procreative transmission of sin
is worse than nonsense: it is an invitation to refuse grace and render
sin demonic.
Although Augustine holds tightly to his doctrine of inherited guilt
throughout his long career as a bishop (he dies still defending it,
c. Jul. imp.), he is never especially interested in working out the
mechanism of transmission. His definitive discussion of the issue,
four books on the soul and its origin (an. et or.), ends on an open
note. Maybe the composite soul of everyone is amassed in Adam and
gets divvied up, so to speak, through acts of procreation, or maybe it
is the act that each time begets a wholly new soul. Augustine counsels
Vincent, the impulsive young man whose craving for certainty
occasions the need for the treatise, to learn how not to know (disce
nescire; an. et or. 4.24.38). It is strange counsel if Augustine is so
certain about sins tie to procreationin which case the first thesis,
about the amassed soul, works best. But his investment lies elsewhere.
He firmly believes that no son or daughter of Adam ever knows
grace apart from what resists it. In that regard, Adam is in us and we
are in him, facing once again the moment of Eves offer. And the
95
challenge will be to see it as a grace and not simply a temptation.
When Augustine holds that contradiction together in his own person
and gives it voice, he takes us to the scene of his conversion.
CONVERSION
The tie that unbinds
If a conversion, then from what to what? Augustine is already
a convinced Christian at the outset of book 8, the book in the
Confessions where he describes being able to heed, after much internal
drama, a directive to put on Jesus Christ and make no plans for
the flesh based on lusts (Rom. 13:14, translated from conf. 8.12.29).
The lusts most at issue in book 8 are discredited things. They are
dumb jokes, the vainest of vanities, old history. They tug pathetically
at Augustines tunic of flesh and try to beg him off the finality of his
resolve (conf. 8.11.26): You are sending us away? We will not be with
you ever again from now to eternity; from now on and for all time,
you will not be permitted this and that. This and that, hoc et illud.
The confessing Augustine is too delicate, or perhaps just too prudent,
to supply us with the referents, but his allusion is unmistakably to the
sexual fantasies that keep him up at night (cf. sol. 1.14.25), even if
they cease to rule his ambitions. Once upon a time he used to pray,
Give me chastity and self-restraint, but not yet (conf. 8.7.17). Now
he is ready to be relieved of unwanted desire and its outsized effect
on his self-image (conf. 8.12.28): One tomorrow after anotherwhy
not now? Why no end to my filth this very hour?
Augustines conversion, read along the lines I have suggested above,
would be from a half-hearted resolve for a chaste life to a resolve that
is fully determinative, but bizarrely impotent. Although there is
something to this as a description of his internal distress, it makes for
an underwhelming conversion. His view of his lifes highest good will
not have fundamentally changed, and he will be turning to God more
for will-power than for wisdom: Put on Jesus Christ, The Lord
(induite dominum)an assumption of superior power and authority.
I left out the title, dominus, when I first quoted the Pauline imperative
that Augustine takes to heart. I introduce it belatedly in an effort to
underscore the strangeness that gets introduced into that familiar
honorific if Christ, as Lord, is really being put on to lord over and
restrain Augustines lusts. Is Augustine supposed to be gaining
96
Christs power of self-restraint? As the wisdom of the flesh, the
Adam who never sins, Christ has no need for such a power and is
essentially alien to it (nupt. et conc. 1.11.13). There is nothing for
Augustine to put on. But the pressing issue in book 8 is not, in any
case, Augustines need for sexual self-restraint. His lusts, he tells us,
have already become the fading remnants of a misspent youth. They
lack the power to drive him into the arms of another mistress. When
he petitions for the highest kind of personal integrity (continentia),
that of being at one with his better self, no more carnal residue, he is
hoping to have his lusts eliminated altogether.
It is not abundantly clear why this is so important to him. If he is
tempted by what he considers to be a lesser good or maybe even a
base one, but he can resist the temptation, why is he so down on
being tempted? An ineffectual desire for forbidden fruit can be like
an inoculation; it boosts moral immunity by eliciting toughness
of will. What Augustine describes in book 8, however, is more like
his wills unraveling. He speaks of having two conflicting wills
(conf. 8.5.10): one old and carnal, the other new and spiritual.
His terms suggest his identification with spirit, but that is too simple.
He is no more in his nascent love of spirit than he is in his departing
lust for flesh. The reality is that he is self-dissociated and invested in
conflict; this leaves him more the agent of his woes, but not wholly.
Augustines recollection of his interior doubling or splitting is very
complex. We need to attend to that complexity before we can have
much of a sense of what was driving him to the brink. Here is a
portion of what he remembers (conf. 8.10.22):
Even as I was deliberating about how to serve my Lord God, as
I had long been disposed to do, it was I who was willing; it was
I who was not. There I wasnot fully willing for, not fully willing
against. And so I contended with myself and split me from me.
The split was happening to me quite against my will (invito), not
as a sign of an alien mind in my nature, but of my own mind,
paying a price (poenam meae). In that respect, it was not I who was
laboring to be self-divided but the sin living within methe sin
that is punishment for a freer sin. For I was a son of Adam.
When Augustine stops talking about his two wills as two antagonists
and picks up with the notion of his two partial wills, locked into bad
co-dependency, he changes the terms of what could count for him as
97
resolution. If he is fighting an implacable foe, then he needs to win.
If he is seeking to become whole, then he needs to be generous to the
part of himself he finds most alien. Augustine invites us in the
passage to think about Adam. When a distinct, still-to-be-known
part of himself offers him knowledge, Adam faces a dilemma: he can
either expend his love on the flesh of his flesh, or he can focus on his
breath, his gift from God (Gen. 2:7), and try being whole alone.
Either way he seems bound for a partial life. If Augustine finds that
he lacks the know-how to knit breath and flesh together and still be
a son of God, then more than inheriting Adams punishment, he is
facing Adams problem.
The wisdom that Augustine remembers having before being thrown
into crisis speaks to a conventionally philosophical piety. He knows
better than to seek his lifes worth from a high-profile job (he was, at
the time, court orator in Milan), and he no longer has the burning
desires he used to have for wealth and reputation. He is ready, almost,
for retirement from the public eye and a contemplative life. Certainly
he has the contemplatives disdain for the distractions of sex and
family life. No less an authority than the Apostle Paul indulges the
faithful in their need to marry (1 Cor. 7:89), but Augustine refuses
to apply that indulgence to himself (conf. 8.1.2). He feels compelled
to hold himself to a higher standard and do without the wife on his
path to God. In the Soliloquies, a dialogue he imagines having with
his own reason, his rational side wonders whether the lower standard
is even a standard (sol. 1.11.18). It is one thing to turn to marriage to
dignify sexual compulsion, quite another to expect that compulsion
really to serve a higher aim. When Augustine assesses his prospects for
spiritual uplift, he quickly notices what binds him most: I was still
being tightly knotted to woman (conligabar ex femina; conf. 8.1.2).
In other words, he is stuck in a bad marriage.
The Latin phrase I have translated as to woman is ex femina.
As with the phrase, ex nihilo, the preposition, ex, signals a context
of origin. God pulls materiality out of a void, ex nihilo, and simulta-
neously forms matter into the created order (conf. 12.29.40), of which
human beings are a restless part. We are in some mysterious way still
knotted to that original nothingness. It is not the cause of why we
sin, but it is, Augustine suggests, the condition of sins possibility
(civ. Dei 14.13): To be deformed by vicethat cant happen unless
nature is made out of nothing. And then there is that other knot of
human origination, common to Augustine and to every other son
98
and daughter of Adam: being born of woman, ex femina. Just as he
refrains from blaming the void for knotting his love to deformity,
Augustine refrains from blaming women for forming deformity
into an image of flesh and knotting his love to that. He blames his
inner Adam.
As the one human being not born of woman, the outer Adam tried
in his own way to rectify the omission. He chose Eve over God.
However misguided his choice may have been at root, it is a more
sensible, more seductive choice than turning from God and embrac-
ing the void. One is a choice of absolute death; the other a choice
of mortality and a partial share in new life. In Augustines mind there
is an intimate and unavoidable connection between his entrance into
the world ex femina and his Adamic desire for sex, for re-partnering.
If woman were simply taken out of the picture, his tie to her undone
(an unbirthing), then Augustine would be more angel than human
in his temptations. Take away the void, the nothingness from which
all things come, and there is no condition left for sins possibility,
either in heaven or on earth. There is only God, nothing else. It is not
easy, while in the thick of a lifes trial (temptatio; conf. 10.28.39), not
to want to do away with too much. When Augustine turns Pauls
practical counsel to the Church of Corinthroughly, Christ is
about to return; dont get too preoccupiedinto a spiritual ideal of
sexless Christianity (b. conjug.; virg.), he is arguably wanting to do
away with too much.
But the usual complaint against Augustine is far more mundane,
and it goes back to Julian of Eclanum, the Pelagian ex-bishop who
saw in his nemesis a crypto-Manichean sex-hater. It is that Augustine
misses or maligns the natural goodness of sex. Granted, it is possible
to want too much of a good thing; it is also possible to want too little.
Julians Aristotelian alternative to a hyperbolic sexuality, given to
lust and self-loathing, is a counsel of moderation (c. Jul. 3.13.27).
In the right life, at the right time, in the right way, sex can express
what is best about being human; it would be perverse and, God-forbid,
Manichean to suggest otherwise.
The limitation of this healthy-minded moralism, when applied to
Augustine, is that he could acquiesce to it without having much
change for him. The quantification of sextoo much, too little, just
rightis beside the point. Let married people have it just right; let
abstainers stay humble and not think themselves superior. Augustines
99
root problem with concupiscence remains. Clearly he makes the
problem out to be sexual in his own case, but more tellingly he never
thinks of Adam as having stayed with Eve for the sex. The two of
them, Augustine insists (civ. Dei 14.2324), would have had perfect
sex in Edenrightly ordered, innocently pleasurable, and invariably
fecund. Although he feels sure that sex is no longer like this, for any-
one, he still wants us to stay open to the possibility that true ecstasy
is not self-disfiguring.
If we hear him talking only about disfigurement, warning us that
a sexual habit (consuetudo carnalis; conf. 7.17.23) clogs a life with
unnatural heaviness, then all of Augustines assurances about the
hypothetically happy sex of a lost Eden will do nothing to make his
theology seem less anti-sexual. The saintly life will be reduced in
quick and dismal fashion to the sexless onewith Gods help, no
less. Christ will have descended to flesh to make a remnant of a saved
remnant unusually chaste. He suffered and died on a cross for that?
No doubt you can tell how I feel about this line of interpretation.
What it misses is the very different sense that Augustine has of his
own imperfection. He falls short of what he calls continentialiterally
a state of being held togethernot simply because he has desires that
he does not want but because he is anticipated in all of his desires by
an ecstasy that he cannot conceive. Not by himself.
Augustine did have a wife, not by law, but certainly in affection,
and he tells us that he remained sexually faithful to her, his one
woman (unam; conf. 4.2.2), during the years they were together. He
does not reveal when he met her or where, or even her name, though
clearly she was with him when in 371 he arrived for the first time in
Carthagea frying pan of unsavory loves (conf. 3.1.1). He was 17.
Looking back he describes his adolescent relationship with her as a
pact for having sex, not children (pactum libidinosi amoris; conf. 4.2.2).
But they did conceive a child together not long into their history: the
boy Adeodatus. The three of them remained in the same household
until Augustine, now in his early thirties, established himself in Milan
as a rhetor of some note, and Monnica, mindful of her sons future,
arranged for his engagement to a girl too young to be wed but a good
prospect for social climbing. The mother of his child returned to
Africa, vowing never to be with another man. Augustine speaks
of the effect on him of her departure (conf. 6.15.25): My sins were
multiplying all the while, and the woman with whom I used to share
100
my bed, who was now an impediment to my marriage, was torn from
my side; the heart in me, where once she was joined, was cut and
wounded, trailing blood. His way of treating the wound of separa-
tion was to take on a mistress short-term, someone to tide him over
until his fiance came of age. This is not a pretty memory for him.
He confesses that he was a slave of lust (libidinis servus) back
then, not a lover of marriage (amator conjugii). And his lust, while
allowing him to grieve more coldly (frigidius), was also making
him more desperate.
His description of his separation from his partner, written to
echo Genesis, occupies only a single paragraph in the Confessions
(conf. 6.15.25). It is nevertheless an important passageway into the
depths of his conversion, superficially his turn-about from pacts of
lust to a stably celibate life of Christian service. While I dont wish to
deny or belittle the surface conversion, I am also not going to pretend
that it tells us much. The real story lies beneath the surface of his
post-conversion celibacy. To get at those depths, we do not have to
psychoanalyze him in absentia; we just need to pay close attention
to his choices of wording, imagery, and scriptural allusion. The first
Adam was originally parted from his partner without a wounding;
that miraculous separation, also a joining, defined for him his
marriage. Augustine describes a parting that is a wounding, and his
efforts to rejoin himself to what he imagines having lost serve only to
heighten his alienation. If we want a vivid sense of what it means
to rely on lust (concupiscentia) when making plans for the flesh,
Augustine gives it to us when he chases after the image of an image
of a consummation. Sex with the short-term mistress fails to satisfy
because she is to him only an image of the woman he has lost. His
love, despite its veneer of lust, is more particular. But what has his
partner been to him? His imagery makes her out to be an extension
of his own body, like a graft of new flesh over his heart. In both
cases, the images distort.
When he is parted from his partnerand his language indicates
violence, not choice (avulsa a latere meo)it is his pain that is his
issue. He barely lets us notice that she has left him her son. Perhaps
she did so because she loved Adeodatus and wanted him to have
more opportunities in life. Perhaps she loved Augustine and wanted
him to get to know his son better. Perhaps she loved them both
and couldnt abide the thought of their separation. There are other
possibilities, of course, most of them more cynical. From the little
101
that Augustine says, one clear thing stands out about her: that his
pact of lust with her was no longer (if it ever was) her pact with him.
She walks away from the sexual partnership still his partner.
I am not telling you that Augustine was selfish and his woman a
paragon of generous love. It is not for me to judge their ancient
bones. But notice that if we read their love for one another
cynically, making him Narcissus to her Echo, then the unity of their
love reduces to a single, sensing bodyhis or hers, nothing other.
And what can come of the one without the other? Take it from
God, It is not good for the human to be alone (Gen. 2:18).
We can try a less cynical reading. Suppose that Augustines sexual
appetite does not crowd out his grief quite as coldly as he would
have us believe in his self-excoriation. Suppose that his woman
lets call her his wifewaits in faith for his healing without having
to diminish herself or what she has been able to offer him. The
more gracious possibilities suggest a different unity of love, impos-
sible to grasp, but in place before anyone thinks to grasp at
an object or an idea. It will always be too late for me to grasp a
unity that runs deeper than my depths, higher than my heights
(conf. 3.6.11). But I know that it is there when I have to give up a
fiction of loves perfection, as I often do, and this leaves me feeling
unexpectedly grateful and secure.
Augustine enjoys an unexpected feeling of securityhe calls it a
light (lux securitatis; conf. 8.12.28)when he finishes reading the
verse that directs him to stop making lust-based plans and trust
in Christ: Right when I got to the end of the verse, it was as if a
securing light flooded my heart; every shadow of a doubt scattered.
Soon after this he will tell his mother to forget about the marriage
plans, more children, the business career. He is done with all that.
His ridiculous old desires decisively behind him, he is ready for his
baptismal rebirth. Only continentia is to be his wife from now on.
Monnica is overjoyed (conf. 8.12.30).
And yet the most evident fiction in his conversion story surrounds
the figure of continenceserene and upbeat, but not crass, enticing
me honorably, he recalls (conf. 8.11.27), to come to her and not
hesitate. She arrives on the scene in all of her allegorical splendor
just before Augustine is completely at his wits end. He has stopped
listening to old habit, but he has yet to realize just how weak the
resolve is that comes of that. She gently counsels him not to secure
himself on his own but to fare forward and leave security to God.
102
With God as her partner, sublime Continence has brought many
beautiful children into the world; none of them have birthed them-
selves. Why is Augustine, she wonders, so fixated on making himself
the exception?
The matter that begs for consideration here is not the transparency
of the fiction (thats patently obvious) but the reality that the fiction
is meant to displace. Augustines actual experience of continentia,
both before and after his conversion, is nothing like his enticement by
the fecund and unthreatening mother of his imagination. He testifies
to a virtue that constantly has to fend off, like some ungovernable
child, overly demanding flesh (civ. Dei 19.4). Even the best saints,
and Augustine reluctantly adds Paul to the list (c. ep. Pel. 1.10.22;
cf. retr. 2.1), have something carnal to repress. But if this is what
continence is really like, what would move Augustine to let go of his
fiction and get real? Though secured by Gods light, he still finds
himself having to repress what he wanted most to redeem. On the
other hand, how can he continue to hold on to a fiction that has
become so flimsy? He isnt getting any benefit from an imaginary
continence; he can hardly expect to benefit more from the imaginary
husband who would wed her.
There is another way to think about Continence in book 8, one that
may allow Augustine a less fictional conversion. Suppose that the
figure stands in for an actual woman and not for a virtue. The virtue
is about strength of will and the shame of having to feel temptation.
The woman is a part of Augustines unmasterable past, but she is
much more to him than just an embarrassment to his virtue. She
shows him by her manner of departing that it is possible to be both
self-possessed and self-giving. She leaves him her son, and this for her
is no abrogation of a pact of lust; she vows never to lie with another
man. Her self-possession apparently does not demand of her that she
hold together all the parts of herself and never ungrip. She gives
Augustine her share in the life they had together. It is up to him to
know (or want to know) what that means. But since it is possible to
read all kinds of motivesome fair, some foulinto her offering,
he is likely to want a more reassuring gift. And so he invents
Continence, the perfect wife and mother, to be Gods counterpart.
Now those are good parents; the son they would offer him would
surely be an unmixed blessing. But now to the question: if he lets go
of the fiction, will his reality be any better?
103
That depends on what we hear in the most famous passage of book
8, the one that many people, not especially obsessed with Augustine,
love to cite. Augustine has left the side of Alypius, the friend keeping
silent vigil with him in his garden retreat, in order to give way to a
more private agony. He weeps uncontrollably under a fig tree and
despairs of his future prospects. His past is too insistent, his God too
angry. The passage picks up from there (conf. 8.12.29):
Suddenly I hear a voice coming from a nearby househard to
say whether it was a girls or a boys; it just kept chanting the
words: pick up and read; pick up and read (tolle, lege). Right
away I felt more relaxed, and I began to think hard about whether
children use a chant like that in some game they play. But
I couldnt remember ever hearing it before. My tears now in
check, I stood up, convinced that the chant was nothing else than
a divine command to me to open my book and read the first
verse that comes to view.
It is striking that Augustine decides to accord a childs voice
commanding authority. He knows next to nothing about this child,
not even its gender, but its voice immediately diverts his attention.
He unclenches. Up to this point he has been in volitional lockdown.
Now he can will one thing: his willingness to be addressed. So far he
gives us no reason to believe that a child is a likely figure of authority
for him, much less a child playing a game. He isnt experiencing the
child per se as authoritative. He hears the words, pick up and read,
and they remind of him of Saint Antonys conversion, how he had
taken words not obviously addressed to him and heeded them as if
they were. In Antonys case the words were from Matthew (Matt.
19:21; conf. 8.12.29): Go, sell all that you have; give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me. When
Augustine picks up his copy of Pauls letters (codex apostoli) and
looks to find his lifes imperative there, he is more likely to be thinking
desert father than father of Adeodatus.
His son will die a few short years after his baptism, around the age
of 17. Easter of 387 Adeodatus, Augustine, and Alypius are all
baptized together in Milan, with Ambrose, the great bishop, presiding.
We know from Augustine that Alypius looked into the same book that
Augustine did, read one verse down, and found another imperative for
104
Augustine to follow (Rom. 14:1; conf. 8.12.30): Take in the person
weak in faith. Alypius was only too happy to think of himself as
still weak and in need of formation if that meant being commended
to Augustines care. One can imagine, without knowing much about
Adeodatus, that the boy felt similarly. For Augustine the timing of
his baptism has had everything to do with his relation to an impera-
tive to put aside his own unformed needs and put on Christ (Rom.
13:14). He must have met that imperative already having had some
experience putting aside his needs. (If not, what was the boys mother
thinking, handing over her son?) He is due to get a great deal more as
he settles into his life as the chief pastor of Hippo, a busy port city.
But what about the putting-on-Christ part?
I have been urging a reading of Augustines conversion that makes
him less beholden to an ideal than to flesh-and-blood women. All the
children of an idealized continence are themselves ideals. They are
her perfected acts (in omnibus continentia ipsa; conf. 8.11.27), or
perhaps they are the acts of her eternal husband; in either case, they
stand in no particular need of parenting. Christ, having had a real
human mother, was not like that. He came out of the womb an infant
and with an infants need of parenting. But being God, he converted
that need into a virtue, a power to release his caretakers from servile
need, more dispirited than animal, and freed in them their need for
him. To put on Christ is to take on a burden of parenting and find it
reassuring to learn that no parent who is not Christ, dominus, has
ever finished growing up. We begin to parent the divine in one another
when we are first helped to pull back from our most sterile desires.
Such desires do not simply go away; they play into the tension that
Augustine thinks of as a divinely parented life (civ. Dei 13.3): We see
that infants are weaker in the use and movement of their limbs and
in their instinct for seeking and avoiding than even the frailest
offspring of other animals, and it is as if the human life-force (vis
humana) were elevating itself out of its own backwards impetus in
order to excel over other animals all the morejust as out of a bows
bend, the arrow that is led back soars.
Augustines conversion is not from lust to self-restraint. It is from
murky self-preoccupation to the precise tension of a life consciously
lived with others. That tension leaves him stretched between God and
the void and tending toward God. He is confident of his direction
not because he knows God or himself so well but because his confi-
dence no longer depends on him having to secure his own knowledge.
105
There is an intimate kind of knowing that comes of that release, one
more allied to trust than to desire.
Learning a first logos
The light of faith, when it floods the heart, liberates perspective.
Augustine stops reading himself into a world where he has no choice
but to live his incarnation from the inside out, where his mortal frame
defines the space that his soul inhabits. It is not that he will never
again feel shortchanged and want what others have (lusts, in this life,
dont go gently), but with God intervening between him and himself,
he can no longer cozy up in quite the same way to his old desires.
What he has come to see, and it seems to have been a sudden revela-
tion for him, is that lustsfor him mainly bedroom antics and
indecencies, rivalries and wrangling (Rom. 13:13; conf. 8.12.29)do
not parent flesh. They not beget or parent anything that is living and
desirous of greater life. It was not lust that brought a child into
Augustines life and elicited from him his need to be a parent. His
pact of lust with his wife in all but name had no provision for
children: if they come, they come uninvited, and compel themselves
to be loved (conf. 4.1.2).
Since most of us tend to think of lust as sexual lustand then
rate lust accordingly, depending on how we feel about sexit is
tempting, when reading Augustine, to equate his notion of lust with
mere sex. But this way of reading him, assuming that mere sex
makes sense, has him committed to confusing sins appeal with sin
itself. (He confesses to the confusion, but he is hardly committed to
it.) Augustine firmly believes that no living being naturally loves
losing life and lapsing back into nothingness; even suicides, he sug-
gests (lib. arb. 3.8.23), wish to be free from pain, not from life. The
appeal of sin, not being lifes negation, must be something else. For
Augustine that something else is either victory without cost (sins
hijack of will) or pleasure without labor (sins hijack of appetite).
There is nothing inherently bad about victory or pleasure; these are
natural consummations, devoutly to be wished. But what does a
perfect victory look like in this life? And how does a pure pleasure
feel? Can we imagine these consummations ahead of time, and, if
so, how well?
When Virgil has the imperial god Jupiter speak of a triumphant,
final destiny for Rome, the associated imagery is of perpetual defeat,
106
a kingdom defined by anger and loss. Behold the king of that
kingdom (Aen. I, 293296; Lombardo, 354359):
The Gates of War,
Iron upon bolted iron, shall be closed,
And inside, impious Fury will squat enthroned
On the savage weapons of war, hands bound tight
Behind his back with a hundred brazed knots,
Howling horrible curses from his blood-filled mouth.
The victor, left out of the frame of defeat, is Augustus Caesar and his
personification of the Roman imperium. It would take more than a
poets art to imagine him a victor victorious without cost.
The Augustine who confesses his hesitations about committing
himself to the celibate life is already disillusioned with the ambitions
of empire (conf. 8.1.2). He does not need to be convinced that an
unrelenting need to win out over others, whether through war or war
by other means, betrays a lust to dominate (libido dominandi; civ.
Dei 1.1), the mark of a desperately unhappy will. He is not so
convinced that his craving for pleasure, had with a partner, is just
as suspect. But something changes in him over the course of his
conversion. He becomes disillusioned. In On the Good of Marriage, a
work not long to follow the Confessions, he does not limit marriage
to child-bearing and the curbing of lust; marriage is also good, he
concedes (b. conjug. 3.3), on account of the natural affiliation
between the sexes. But certainly his more liberal readers will be sorry
to learn that he has no hope for the sexual expression of that affiliation.
The better the marriage, he goes on to say, the earlier husband
and wife will have begun by mutual consent to hold themselves back
from sexual commingling. He is not imagining two people hating
sex and fleeing what they hate. There would be no merit in that, only
necessity. He imagines two people disentangling their natural affection
for one another from a hopelessly compromised good. When Augustine
puts on Christ and accepts celibacy, he positions himself to be the
best of husbands or at least an average monk.
As we know, Augustine ends up a priest, and by no means an
average one, but this is not a direction that his sexual ethic would
have dictated for him. His ethic reflects what remains unresolved
for him after a lifetimes faithful struggle: how being a son of God
frees him to be of mortal, mothered birth. His sexuality draws him
107
powerfully into the mystery of his flesh but fails to illuminate it. His
eternal, bodiless God fills his mind with light, but leaves his flesh
to the darkness of desire. The taut pain of that tensionbetween
wanting to know and wanting to be wholeis what finally steadies
his will and, at the same time, humbles it. For Augustine does not will
the conditions that shape his attention, and he does not will that
to which he attends. Or as he himself puts it (Simpl. 1.2.10): There
are two things that God gives us: that we will and what we have willed
(ut velimus, quod voluerimus). He wants the that to be both his
and ourshis by calling, ours by following. The what he alone
gives. The what is most basically a life. When his will becomes a
conduit for divine light, Augustine is secured in his knowledge that
his life, both spirit and flesh, is what he has been given to live. The
flesh part of the offering continues to be hard for him, however, to
want completely. In that, he is his own ambivalent Adam, bound for
sexual trouble.
Was there ever a moment in which he felt unstretched and out
of tension with himself ? He never describes one. Not even the
providential resolution of his agony in the garden, recounted more
than 10 years after the fact, resolves him fully. He speaks there
(conf. 8.12.29) of the security of his knowledge, not of his being:
light illumines, doubts scatter, temptations persist. Look!, he begs
God a few books later (conf. 11.29.39), my life is a stretch (distentio).
If we chart by the lights of Augustines theology, we should not be so
surprised that the stretch, more than the moment of illumination, is
what counts. He lets us have our epiphanies on the road to Damascus
or to wherever we assume, rightly or wrongly, that God is taking us,
but these are negative revelations, insights into how blind we have
been. Augustine gets his own version of a roadside revelation while
trying to make sense of Romans 9: he is struck to his core by how
deeply conservative and resistant to new life sin must be if, as Paul
suggests, election is so gratuitous. Lust, Augustine is led to concede,
is a universal solvent, not a sign of animation (Simpl. 1.2.20): The
carnal concupiscence that is sins penalty now reigns, and it has
reduced all of humankind to a single stew, where original guilt gets
into everything. Happily the revelation of grace that moves ahead
of this dark epiphany is more radical. Sin may be revealed in the
moment, but grace has its roots in eternity. From where we stand,
somewhere between the moment and eternity, the conjoined revelation
feels like a stretchand sometimes a pulling apart.
108
To get a better sense of what this stretch is, think of language-
learning and its difficulties. Begin with a simple theory of teaching,
the one that Augustine begins with in his treatise on scriptural inter-
pretation, or how to become a good reader of the Word: All teaching,
he writes (doc. Chr. 1.2.2), is either of things or of signs, but things
are learned through signs. Say that I am trying to teach my young
daughter, who is just beginning to use words, the meaning of the
word pug. I point to the snoring mound of dog-flesh on the sofa
(where no dog is supposed to be), utter the word pug, and hope that
my daughter makes the intended association. Now add to this (overly)
simple kind of teaching a theory of learners motivation. What moves
my daughter, what moves anyone to learn a language? If learning is
more than conditioning (and lets assume that it is), then I can expect
my daughter to become increasingly self-aware over the course of
her initiation into a new language. At first her language-learning is
probably much like conditioning. Out of an inarticulate desire to
please her father, she pays attention to my gesticulations and the
noises coming out of my mouth, and if the object that I am trying to
get her to attend to is sufficiently divertingit is cute, or curious, or
colorfulshe is moved, still in a largely inarticulate way, to associate
her two forms of attention: to me and to the object. Years later, when
she is able to move from her established word-use into new ventures
of meaning, she will be articulating her motives for attending to
things in quite sophisticated ways. What it means to her to please her
father, to indulge the pug, to do the one in the context of the other or
vice versaall this and much more begins to emerge out of the inner
life of her language-use.
Augustine is highly attuned to the goods that both direct and derail
initiation into a language, and he suggests the following as a necessary
principle of their inner ordering (doc. Chr. 1.3.3): There are, on the
one hand, things to be enjoyed, and, on the other, things to be used;
some things turn out to be both. Now try to imagine a world of
experience in which all goods are felt to have precisely the same
valence: love of a parent, love of a child, a healthy diet, a great job,
a dip in the pool, a fancy hair-do, all of these goods and countless
others attract equivalently. If Augustines principle is a valid and
necessary principle, then your effort of imagining has ended in fore-
seeable failure. Lets be clear about what the source of the failure is.
You can list a number of goods, as I just did, using the words you
have learned for signifying them, and, in the abstract, you can think
109
that all those goods have the same undifferentiated goodness. Of
course you can do this. What you cannot do is play this game
of abstraction without having to abstract yourself from the very
practices of subordination, use to enjoyment, that have internally
ordered your experience of goodness and allowed you your use
of your words. It is only within a language that you can imagine
yourself opting out.
But Augustine doesnt just want to claim that our expressive
capacities are intimately bound up with our evaluative practices
(thats a fairly uncontroversial thesis); he wants to weigh in on what
those evaluative practices have to be. The only proper object of enjoy-
ment, he insists (doc. Chr. 1.6.6), is the triune GodFather, Son, and
Spirit; all other goods, make the list as long as you like, must be made
subordinate to that one, sublimely enjoyable good. It is tempting,
given our modern, post-Kantian ethical sensibilities, to hear him
advancing an ethical theory, a very bad one. It is a theory that has us
using and discarding non-God goods, like our neighbors, in order to
get to God. Not very loving to the neighbors, to say the least, and not
very loving of God to expect us to be like that. But to read Augustine
this way is to assume, contrary to the deepest currents in his theology,
that we have a neutral place from within ourselves either to sublime
God or, more regrettably, something else. Go back to my language-
learning daughter for a moment. Suppose that nothing ever emerges in
her that craves a parents recognition. Is she likely to learn a language,
to develop self-awareness? I dont see how. When Augustine confesses
that God alone is to be enjoyed (and his claim is essentially a confes-
sion), read him to mean that he owes his emerging self-awareness, the
inner life of his language, to his craving for Gods recognition and
that alone. There is nothing to understand, no words to be spoken,
apart from the Word that speaks from within the void and makes it
fruitful. Such is Augustines vision of language-learning.
Almost. If God is the parent of the logos, of language itself, then
there is no end to the articulation of goodness. There will be always
some further offering to pull us out of the womb of certainty and
into the wilderness of abundant life; that is a stretch of our being
in one direction. There is also the stretch the other way, not to an
alternative intelligibility, a language of darkness, but to the illusion
of one. It is a seductive illusion, and we cannot hope to see all the
way through it in this life. But even to know as much that it is there,
shadowing the logos, is no small achievement.
110
Augustine tries to elicit this knowledge from his son, Adeodatus, in
the dialogue, On The Teacher (mag.), written less than a year before
the boys death and offering an accurate representation, Augustine
later discloses, of the boys gift (conf. 9. 6.14): You know, God, that
the views attributed to him there, as my partner in the conversation,
were all really his. But the role of Adeodatus in the dialogue is not
so much to advance a view, however intelligent, as to keep his father
from claiming dogmatic authority for his. It is this use of his intelli-
gence that is his true gift. (Here bear in mind that the Latin word,
dogma, means teaching and that the name, Adeodatus, translates as
Gods gift.) Augustine opens the dialogue on a question of motive
(mag. 1.1): What do we seem to you to want to accomplish, he asks,
when we talk? The question, raised by a father and asked of a
beloved son, has a special resonance. This is not merely some abstract
query about language-use. It invites recollection of the Trinitarian
bond between Father and Son: a love so intensely generous it seems to
add something even to God. It also hints at forgotten forgetfulness.
Adeodatus gives his tentative response: Inasmuch as I have an
answer now, we want either to teach (docere) or to learn (discere).
Augustines next move, crucial to the underlying aim of the dialogue,
is to press an unlikely thesis. He wants Adeodatus to drop learning as
a motive for language-use. The only motive, he insists, is to teach,
and to teach is to use a sign to evoke a meaning, the thing signified.
I teach my daughter what a pug is when I use a spoken word, a picture,
or a pantomime to get her to think of a pug. Augustine is indifferent
as to whether to call this kind of teaching a reminding. (It seems more
of a reminding once I can take her word-recognition for granted.)
Again his main interest is to block learning. Even when it comes to
asking a question, Augustine manages to find and make fundamental
the dogmatic motive (mag. 1.1): For I ask you this, whether you ask
your question for any other reason than to teach the person you are
asking what you want.
Adeodatus is never fully convinced of his fathers dogmatism, but
in one of the many ironies of the dialogue, he concedes to it without
subscribing to a dogmatism of his own. His intent is to stay open to
what his father may have still to teach him. But what is there to be
learned from a conception of language-learning that makes a learner
out to be so resolutely unreceptive? The lesson, at first, seems entirely
negative. If we fancy ourselves teachers, skilled at affixing pieces of our
inner life to material sounds and signs, all the stuff of incarnation,
111
then we ought to take some time to notice how little we control the
translation. Augustine presses hard on the basic insight that animates
all of his reflection on teaching: that teaching aims at the thing to be
taught, but always through a sign; the sign (signum) is not the thing
itself (res). When my daughter uses the word pug, as I have taught
her to use it, how do I know that she isnt using that word to mean
what I mean by furry or sofa-loving or given to loud snoring? The
tighter we tie language-use to the ghostly ideal of perfect translation,
mind-to-mind, with the body acquiescing, the more painfully obvious
it becomes that one life is closed off from another. The body never
does acquiesce; its constant offering is to resist a certain pretension
of spirit.
But I would not stay too long with a negative moral. The dialogue
is not trying to convince us that we are at heart false teachers,
stumbling over empty signs. How do I know that? I know it because
the son still loves the father, even as the father affects to be the teacher
he is not. (I have at times been both father and son.) Augustine and
Adeodatus conclude that they do share an inner life together, one
that neither of them possesses separately. They call this life their
teacher. This is the life that both begins and ends their lifes argument,
allowing them learning through the hesitations, sometimes terrible,
of sin. Augustine puts it this way (mag. 11.38). The one who teaches,
who is said to live in the interior person, where he is consulted,
is Christ, Gods unchangeable virtue and endless wisdom; every
thinking living being consults this wisdom, but takes away only as
much as it is able, according to its disposition (voluntatem), either
good or bad.
Dont count on Augustines Christ to be a mind-fixer. The power
that bypasses a difference of flesh and fixes two minds directly upon
the same thoughtas comic as pug or as tragic as waris no power
of incarnation. It is really no power at all, but a disposition to resist
wisdom, dressed as a conceit of learning. Remember that the only
good to be enjoyed is God. And what is God? Nothing thinkable.
Not completely. But neither is anything loved in the flesh completely
thinkable. There is always something there that resists abstraction.
Without that something there would be no grief, but also no beginning
to a lifeand so no new life.
For there to be a beginning, Augustine writes (civ. Dei 12.21),
a human being was created, before whom there was no one. After
Eden, there are beginnings still. No birth takes the sum of its
112
measure from the previous Adam. It is Christ, as God, who parents the
flesh; it is Christ, a mothers son, who brings to flesh a beginningone
in particular. The other beginnings are different. When Augustine
puts on Christ, he does not become Jesus of Nazareth. He stretches,
in a labor of incarnation, to accept who he is already in Gods sight:
a beloved son. No being not truly of the flesh can enter into the
crucible of times distension, self-divide, and emerge sanely different.
I speak not of metaphysical alchemy but of genealogy. We were once
the people who came before us, and now we are different. It all goes
back to Godforward too. Augustine wants a life less pending (who
doesnt?), but not a life apart (conf. 11.29.39):
Now I spend my years sighing, while you, Lord, my solace, my
father, are eternal. Still I am being scattered into times whose
order I know not, and my deepest thoughts, my souls viscera, are
by happenstance and tumult being torn apartuntil into you
I flow, purified and made molten by the fire of your love.
113
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE: TIME TROUBLED
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
Eliot
Virgil ends the Aeneid with an unsettling image of triumph. Aeneas
of fallen Troy, leader of a refugee people, has weathered shipwreck,
unfated love, underworldly visions, and tribal warfare to find himself
standing triumphant over a humbled Turnus, once a proud and
unbending prince and now a suppliant. In a surge of rage, Aeneas
refuses supplication and kills his helpless enemy, whose resentful soul
slips into the underworld.
Turnus has done the most to make the fate of Aeneas a bloody
one. The premise of the epic has been that Aeneas is destined to
survive defeat, negotiate difficult seas (his odyssey), and settle finally
on Romes site, there to found a new empire out of Trojans and
Latin tribesmen. He is sponsored in this fate, at times bullied into it,
by Jupiter, the Olympian patriarch. But Jupiter does not invent the
fate that makes for an Aeneas; that fate is in place before his involve-
ment. Meanwhile the role of Juno, Jupiters consort and rival, is
to complicate the inevitable; she works to ensure that Aeneas pays
a price, Jupiter too, for victory. Defying the sacred boundary between
the realms of life and death, she lets a Fury out of hell to sow rumor,
resentment, and rage among the peoples whom Aeneas would have
otherwise won over quietly. More given to fury than most, Turnus
feels the slight of being slighted all the way down to his depths,
and he lets out his own bit of hell in a bid to claim his rights to a
native throne.
114
Before all the fighting is done and he finishes a beaten suppliant,
Turnus will have killed Pallas, son of Evander, a Greek king. Evander
is the unlikely ally who puts Aeneas in charge of a leaderless Latin
tribe and moves him a step closer to unified rule; he also entrusts
Aeneas with educating his son in the art of war. When Aeneas looks
down and sees that Turnus is wearing the ornamented belt of the
slain prince, a grim trophy, he loses his composure and shows signs
of a savage grief (saevi doloris). This leads to the epics final
slaying, set up as if it were a sacrificial offering (Aen. 12.947952;
Lombardo 11501157):
Do you think you can get away from me
While wearing the spoils of one of my men?
Pallas sacrifices you with this strokePallas
And makes you pay with your guilty blood.
Saying this, and seething with rage, Aeneas
Buried his sword in Turnus chest. The mans limbs
Went limp and cold, and with a moan
He soul fled resentfully down to the shades.
Turnus, it should be noted, never begged for his life; his petition was
for his father, Daunus, who would need a body to bury before being
able to consign his defeated son to beloved memory (Aen. 12.931936;
Lombardo 11291135):
Go ahead, use your chance. I deserve it.
I will not ask anything for myself,
But if a parents grief can still touch you,
Remember your own father Anchises,
And take pity on Daunus old age,
I beg you. Give me, or if you prefer,
Give my dead body back to my people.
We know what Aeneas ends up preferring, or what his anger has
him prefer. He will be delivering a dead son back to an old man.
Virgil gives us no reason to assume, given his characterization of his
hero, that Aeneas will fail to deliver the body and choose instead to
revenge himself or, as he says, revenge Pallas, on a corpse. This is the
Aeneid, not the Iliad. So what is so unsettling then about the epics
final scene?
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE
115
Not, I suspect, the mere fact of the murder. We can condemn it or
condone it or take our readers prerogative of suspended judgmentit
is, after all, just a story. And it is a familiar story when retold at a
comfortable level of abstraction: a powerful man, with a sense of
destiny and some inner complexity, is prompted to remember that
the bearer of his futurethe heir he hopes will either perfect or
surpass his self-imagehas feet of clay; wanting to undo the
memory, he strikes out in rage at its prompt, his external teacher.
In the particular version of this story that is his, Aeneas does not
lose his own son, the boy Ascanius, surnamed Ilus (Julius), to the
fortunes of war; he loses Pallas, one of his men. As long as he
can substitute another mans son for his owncall this his sacrifice
of memory, Aeneas can exit his story the presumptive father of an
eternal kingdom, the Adam to an eventual Caesar.
But most of us know very well that time stands as silent witness
against this conceit, both for the reader and for the fiction. At the
end of a long song about arms and a man (arma virumque cano;
Aen. 1.1), Virgil will have done less to canonize Aeneas, from the
beginning a man of reverence (insignem pietate; Aen. 1.10), than to
render him pietys question-mark. How is it possible to commend a
sacrificed son to his fathers memory and not invite more death into
life? What does a lost future really ask of a Dido, of an Aeneas, of
any reluctant prophet or hero? How do we let the future go and still
have time ahead of us? No imperium, dreaming the dream of its own
eternity, can afford to dwell on these questions, much less remember
the answers.
As an augur for an eternal kingdom, Aeneas is remarkably bad at
remembering. He affects to speak for Pallas, a lost son, cast into the
underworld of a fathers grief. We hear Aeneas speaking in the tongue
of a moments rage and impotence; he doesnt know in that moment
the first thing about the love between a father and a son. He kills not
to remember but to make the moment pass. Would he have had a
better memory had it been Ascanius, not Pallas, whose voice needed
retrieving from the underworld? What unsettles me most, I confess, is
the thought that he would have. Virgil relieves me of my confidence
that I can want a father, and not just some fiction of one, to mourn his
son and not be angry. I admit it. I prefer eternal peace to piecemeal
happiness. I want no parent ever to have to mourn a child. I want to
live with my extended human family in the just kingdom that has
no end. And until such time as that kingdom comes to pass, I prefer
116
to do business with an angry God. (The forgiving one asks too much
of my memory.) I am not as far from the reverence of an Aeneas as
I generally like to imagine. He and his descendents, the Romans, all
become great Juno worshippers, the goddess who remembers to be
angry. Virgil, it seems to me, has not written an epic that is basically
for or basically against empire; in those terms it is both and neither.
He has more fundamentally tapped into the underworld of our
human need for security. And things are very unsettling there.
There is no one in the ancient world more familiar with this unset-
tlement, more identified with it, than Augustine. Along with Virgil he
gives it a literary form and even an itinerary, but no resolution. Still
Augustine is no Virgil. He eventually breaks faith with his old literary
love, the delight of his schoolboy days (conf. 1.13.22), and trades in
Virgilian pathos for confessional self-scrutiny. No more weeping for
Dido (conf. 1.12.21); Augustine weeps for sin. By the time he has
begun the great work of his senior years, the formidable City of God,
Virgil has become for him the honorary poet-in-residence of the dark
city (civitas terrena)a shadowy, often violent place where desire is
opaque as earth and just as seductive.
Augustine is 59 when he writes the first three books of City of God.
This is several years after Alaric marched his Goths into Rome and
made that city seem less than eternal; it is about 2 years after the
Conference of Carthage, where Catholic bishops in North Africa won
imperial backing in their long struggle against their Donatist rivals.
Marcellinus, sent by emperor Honorius to preside over the proceed-
ings, was a close friend and disciple of Augustines. He was hoping
that in the wake of the Catholic victory Augustine would be able to
persuade Volusianus, proconsul of Africa, to convert to Christianity.
Volusianus was holding off largely because he was unconvinced that
Christianity had been of more benefit to Rome than its ancestral
pagan traditions (a commonly voiced skepticism of pagan elites, post
Alaric). It is fair to say that imperial machinations and their churchly
implications are much on Augustines mind when he begins City of
God, but as a work nearly a decade and a half in the making (he is 73
when he finishes it), it transcends its original impetus. The earthly
city gets loosed from its initially tight association with Roman poli-
tics and history and, more particularly, with Romes struggle, both
helped and hindered by paganism, to keep love of legitimate glory
from devolving into a lust to dominate (civ. Dei 5.19). In the abstract,
the city becomes a dangerous ideal, a noxious prescription for peace.
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE
117
The ideal is still Virgils to articulate (Aen. 6.853, Lombardo 1018;
civ. Dei 1.1): To spare the humbled, and to conquer the proud.
But the history of its implementation is hard to make out as
anyones: its lust and domination, all the way down, or love of self
reaching into contempt of God (amor sui usque ad contemptum
Dei; civ. Dei 14.28).
One can imagine Virgil and Augustine, joined by David Hume and
Edward Gibbon in some kind of celestial NPR round-table, having a
spirited debate over the virtues of a pagan, as opposed to Christian,
Rome. Only Virgils position would be unforeseeable. Hume and
Gibbon, both stylists of the modern age, would lament the replace-
ment of paganisms vital passions with worship of the exclusive
God, whose kingdom, in so far as it pertains to this world, sanctifies
poverty and intolerance. Having devoted the first ten books of his
massive opus to a blistering critique of polytheistically inspired
justice and happiness (and the critique really doesnt end there),
Augustine, I am confident to think, would disagree. But his disagree-
ment would come with a qualification. The abstract distinction between
an earthly city, hell bent on self-aggrandizement, and a heavenly city
on earthly pilgrimage, honing its love of God, is easier thought than
applied. In this age, Augustine writes (civ. Dei 1.35), the two cities
are indeed thoroughly tied together and mixed in with one another;
it isnt until the last judgment that they get separated out. Given that
this age (hoc saeculum) comprises for him all of historical time,
or time as we know it, the qualification seems big. Now we can
never claim that some regime, some would-be empire, simply is the
summation of God-contempt and stupid self-love; we would have to
be living in hell to be able to claim that. Nor can we claim that some
church of this age, calling itself Christs and having arrived at some
modus videndi, intimate or hands off, with secular power, just is all
of Gods city on earth.
Augustines aversion to closure, whether claimed for the soul or the
city, is one of the defining features of his theology. But there is more
than one way to construe the aversion. The two I have in mind con-
stitute a cross-roads for him. He cannot take one road without leaving
the other behind, and he cannot move forward without choosing a
direction. Most of the perplexity of his theology can be traced back
to his tendency to linger or, what comes to same thing, to want to
take both roads at once. One road is the path of belief, or, more
accurately, belief in belief. On this path my Christian convictions
118
wont necessarily make me a good person (indeed it would be both
arrogant and nave of me to think that they would), but they do
define for me, in a way that I can fully understand, what the life is
that is worthy of redemption. The fact that I see it but dont live it
means that I am still laboring under a burden of unreasoning habit.
I need grace to free me from my addictions and secure me in what
I believe is most true. The other road leads to the underworld of
belief: to unconfronted fears, forgotten desires, inarticulate hopes,
lost innocenceall the stuff that must be ignored or repressed to
have a perfect conviction. But this is not a path of disbelief or even
suspension of belief. I dont move forward by negating or suspending
a conviction that I have yet to perfect. And I do want to perfect my
beliefs on this path. Call it a path of grace. Perfection on this path
will require me to take a blessing, not a curse, from the underworld;
it will always come in the form of a goodness that distends, some-
times wrecks my selfs integrity. While in this life, I can never say
when such blessings will end. And I know no other life.
Of course by calling one of the roads a path of grace and a path
where belief is perfected, I seem to be suggesting that the other has
no claim to grace and perhaps not much of one to belief. This is, in
fact, exactly what I think. Still it is important that both roads be
perceived to have some initial claim to grace and belief; otherwise
Augustines opting at times for both will have no seductiveness to it.
And we would be fools to suppose that there is no seductiveness
there. But now let me attempt to do the work of differentiation
less ambiguously.
Consider the case of the Donatists. The Donatist movement had
its roots in the Diocletian persecutions of the early-fourth century.
Christians were required, on pain of death, to turn over their scrip-
tures to Roman authorities for a public burning. The clergy who
preferred compliance to martyrdom were known in the North
African context as traditoresthose who trade over (trado) their
faith. Many North African Christians were convinced that the
traditores had lost all authority to mediate the sacraments, including
the consecration of priests and primates. In 313, when the deacon
Caecilian was consecrated primate of Carthage by a suspected traditor,
schism broke out. The suspicion was unfounded, as it turned out, but
the divisiveness within North African Christianity continued unabated.
One party took its name from Donatus the Great, the charismatic
alternative to Caecilian in the See of Carthage, and it held its clergy
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE
119
to a rigoristic standard of sanctity. Donatists commonly thought
of themselves as the church of the martyrs and were prepared to
discount the Christianity of the more faint-hearted. The other party,
championed by Augustine, claimed the mantle of catholicity for itself
and emphasized outreach to a sinful world. The result would cer-
tainly be sin within the church, but the catholic side refused to believe
that sacramental efficacythe catharsis of a baptism or the validity
of an ordinationdepended on the sanctity of the officiant.
Around 408, still a number of years before the Conference of
Carthage, where Donatists would lose all hope of a political victory,
Augustine wrote to Vincent, the Rogatist bishop of Cartenna in
Mauretania Caesariensis (ep. 93). An old acquaintance, Vincent
knew Augustine from his bad old days in Carthage. Augustine opens
reassuringly (ep. 93 1.1): I am now more avidly in search of quiet
than back when you knew me as a young man and Rogatus, your
predecessor, was still alive. Augustine then goes on at length to give
his reasons for why he and his fellow bishops are obliged, as pastors,
to cooperate with imperial authorities in the suppression of North
African Donatism. This was undoubtedly less reassuring to Vincent.
The Rogatists were a Donatist splinter group, small in number and
confined to Cartenna. They had repudiated the violent practices of
some Donatist extremists (mostly a business of club-wielding gangs
roaming the countryside), but they remained more aligned with a
rigoristic ecclesiology than with the catholic alternative. Anticipating
Vincents objection that no one should be forced into righteousness
(cogi ad iustitiam; ep. 93 2.5)here meaning an upright Christian
lifeAugustine quotes what will become his favorite proof-text
in debates over the propriety of religious coercion (Lk. 14:23):
Whomever you find, compel them to come in.
The context for that verse in Luke is the parable that Jesus tells of
a great dinner, to which many are invited (Lk. 14:1524). When the
feast is ready to be served, the host sends his servant out to collect the
invited guests, all of whom plead excuses for not coming. Basically
they are too busy with their own wealthnew land, new oxen, new
brideto want to try out someone elses. When the host hears
of this, he becomes angry and sends his servant out again, this time
with instructions to go into the streets and alleys of the town and
bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame. It is easy to
convince these people to come; they know that they could use a good
meal. But their numbers fall well short of what the hosts house can
120
accommodate, and this is supposed to be a great dinner, to which
many are invited. For a third and last time, the servant is sent out,
now with instructions to return to the streets and alleys and compel
whomever he finds there to come in.
This last directive, Augustines proof-text, strikes me in its Lukan
context as more perplexing than sinister. Is this a very big servant?
How is he supposed to compel what is implied to be a large number
of people to come to a feast for which they have no taste or hunger?
I suppose, given the ease with which the needy people were brought
in, that the best way would be to convince them that they are a good
deal needier than they imagine themselves to be. But then Jesus ends
the parable with the most perplexing line of all (Lk. 14:24): For I tell
you, none of those who were invited will taste my dinner. The
servant in the story is no longer being addressed (you is plural in
the Greek); Jesus has reverted to his own role as host and is now
speaking to his audience, who is there, along with him, dining on
some other hosts lesser fare (Lk. 14.1). What perplexes me most
about his concluding line, the moral of his parable, is its implication
that the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame arent on the
messianic guest list. I get it that the original invitees wont be coming;
they are too tied to the riches of this world to want something more.
The poor and company are coming, but not, it would seem, because
of the neediness that they perceive in themselves. (The prodigal son
thought he was needy too, but this is not why he ended up fted at his
fathers house.) So I wonder: why isnt our self-confessed neediness
our ticket into the banquet hall of Gods city?
I have learned from Augustine, the great student of grace, to value
this kind of question, but he asks himself nothing of its like when
he adapts Luke to Realpolitik. The servant in his version of Lukes
parable is the servant church, called especially to gather the humbled
to the Lords table and to rebuke the proud. When this church comes
head to head with its own animus, that of the self-admiring servant,
lacking in humility, it cannot be content merely to rebuke. It must
end its self-division and compel unity. The means of compulsion,
Augustine concedes, should be moderate. No torture or capital
punishment, but fines, confiscation of property, and exile are all
within the bounds of the permissible (ep. 93 3.10). The Donatists are
to be given a lesson, it seems, not about the agonies of the flesh, but
about its persistent vulnerability to poverty and so about its inherent
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE
121
neediness. Threaten to take away their material sustenance with a strong
imperial hand, and they will soon break with their empty habit of
casting themselves a people apart. Augustine has seen the results.
His own native Thagaste, once a Donatist enclave, went Catholic
out of fear of the imperial laws (ep. 93 5.17), and now no one is
complaining. It is cases like that, Augustine confides to Vincent, that
finally changed his mind about compelled catholicity. He used to be
against any kind of compulsion in matters of faith. But who can
argue with results?
My point is not that Augustine surely must have been deceived
about the good people of Thagaste and elsewhere; nor am I suggest-
ing that he had no justification for wanting to mix some imperial
politics into his church affairs. The church and the earthly city, being
part of the same admixture, are bound to aspire to peace in roughly
the same way: forge or force agreement out of a conflict of wills. The
forging is not always so different from the forcing. Obvious tyrants
rule from fear; the more subtle ones appeal to freedom and get people
to tyrannize themselves. As any thinking creature of appetite is liable to
discover, forces of desire can be divisive in the most stable of market-
places: some people will be served more than others, some far more,
some not at all. The pursuit of happiness commonly divides us, one
from another. Still if the veneer of peace that gets pasted over all this
is a universal goodas Augustine seems to think (there is no one
who does not want to have peace; civ. Dei 19.12)then his reasons
for giving into a limited coerciveness may lie somewhere within the
paste: in the admixture of fear and desire that both conditions and
limits consent (cf. spir. et litt. 31.53). I would be a hypocrite to deny
him that possibility; I too value the peace of the earthly cityno
doubt to a fault. But I would urge against him, with the student of
grace as my ally, that there is no spiritual use to be made of a coerced
peace. None, at least, that avails itself to human calculation.
When Augustine assumes otherwise, he lapses into bad analogies.
There is a striking instance of this in his letter to Vincent, where he
compares God the Father to Judas Iscariot (ep. 93 2.7). Augustine is
quite prepared to condemn Judas for having turned Jesus over to the
Sanhedrin and by extension to the Roman imperium. But Augustine
also believes, on Pauls authority (Rom. 8:32), that God too can
be said to have handed Jesus over. In regard to this handing over (hac
traditione), why, asks Augustine, is God holy and the man guilty,
122
if not because there was no one motive (causa) for the one thing they
did? The question, which contains its own answer, is doubly mis-
leading. First of all, Judas and God dont really commit the same
act. Judas creates a void in the good by acting out of fear and greed;
God creates goodness out of a void by stripping fear and greed of
their authority. It isnt Judas who will determine the meaning of the
crucifixion. But having locked God and Judas into the same act of
betrayal, Augustine finds that he can exonerate God only through a
difference in motive. And this is what is most misleading about his
rhetorical question. He encourages Vincent to focus on the wrong
kind of difference.
Imagine a less greedy Judas. He does not betray Jesus for the
money. He genuinely believes that his teacher, whom he has come to
love, has become a danger to his own people. Too many Jews falsely
assume that Jesus is going to free them from Roman occupation;
that assumption is more than likely to get most of them killed. For
the sake of the greater good, Judas very reluctantly and with great
internal torment decides to hand Jesus over. Does the difference in
motive mitigate his guilt? Just on basic considerations of justice
alone, I think that it would have to. But now take the next fateful
step and try not to notice the theological abyss yawning before you.
Imagine Judas having Gods motive for having turned Jesus over.
Is he now guilt free? He would be if it were possible to reason like
this: if an act that I do wickedly is an act that God can do well, then
I can do that same act well as long as I act with Gods intent. In other
words, I just have to anticipate and then will the good that God would
be bringing to my situation.
With some charity, we can leave Augustine with juridically respect-
able reasons for having preferred imperial intervention to civil unrest.
But we do him no service at all if we concede to his church anything
remotely like this power of anticipation. The core insight of his the-
ology is that God sets all of the conditions for grace, including the
need. We can add as much nobility as we can possibly muster to our
coercive practices; we still will not be able to prompt in others or in
ourselves the need for grace. Any church that denies or forgets this
ceases to refer its virtues to God (civ. Dei 19.25). Soon it will find
itself embracing the same imperatives that define the earthly city:
spare the humbled, beat down the proud.
When Aeneas first hears of these imperatives, Virgil has him in the
underworld, listening to the shade that was in life his father, Anchises.
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE
123
Here is the fuller directive that passes from father to son in that most
unlikely of places (Aen. 6.847853; Lombardo 10121018):
Others will, no doubt, hammer out bronze
That breathes more softly, and draw living faces
Out of stone. They will plead cases better
And chart the rising of every star in the sky.
Your mission, Roman, is to rule the world.
These will be your arts: to establish peace,
To spare the humbled, and to conquer the proud.
It is not hard to hear in the passage the beginnings of a confusion
between the art of peace-making and imposed rule. Perhaps the
confusion for citizens of the earthly city is, as Augustine suggests,
as unavoidable as sin itself. (We live still in the shadow of that one
unfinished transgression.) Students of the earthly city and mythologists
of empire would nonetheless do well to keep in mind the under-
worldly context of Virgils nascent imperialism.
Aeneas is not being given sunlit imperatives to apply without a
moments cost to the world of the living, where death is more a fear
than a wisdom. He is taking his share of the underworld with him to
his new home. It dogs him like a Fury when he denies it. When he
kills Turnus, he seems more Fury than man. He has lost his ability to
discern the difference between pride and humility. The man kneeling
before him, pleading for a fathers memory, is apparently not reminder
enough. The Fury reemerges, and Aeneas can see only a rival victor
at his feet, playing at suppliant. He dispatches the threat and pays
Junos ultimate priceand Romesfor victory. Virgils Juno,
the goddess most in touch with the power of the underworld, is
quite clear about what that price is. She will end her efforts to subvert
the will of Jupiter, her sky-dwelling consort, on one condition
(Aen. 12.828; Lombardo, 9991000): Troy has fallen. Let the name
of Troy be fallen too. Jupiter foolishly agrees and assures her that
when it comes to the Romans, no nation shall be more zealous in
Junos worship (Aen. 12.840; Lombardo 10141015).
The gods give Aeneas his victories, but not his life. His torment
is that he cannot remember the importance of that difference.
He doesnt remember what it means to have been a Trojan and the
young son of a living father. His final act in his own drama is to offer
blood to the angry shade that has displaced his memory. There is no
124
reverence there. If I were to write the epilogue for Aeneas the pious,
his epitaph too, it would go something like this:
Once upon a time, I was a wandering Aeneas, feeling victimized
by an angry goddess. (She cost me a good marriage and an ordi-
nary life, among other things.) A living man once told me that
I would have to love and worship this goddess above all others; a
dead man once told me that Id father a race of conquerors. I put
the two wisdoms together when I killed a man who bore for me
the image of my own impotence. From then on, I learned to love
righteous anger. I learned to love Juno, and I no longer wandered
for every land was my own.
Ill always wonder what Virgil himself would have written. The
received tradition on the Aeneid is of a hauntingly unfinished poem.
Virgil completed a draft but became mortally ill before he could
undertake the revisions. According to one of his ancient biographers,
he wanted the manuscript burned upon his death, but Augustus
Caesar intervened. A better poet for Augustines earthly city and all
its ambiguities can scarcely be imagined.
But what of the other city, more other than under in its worldliness,
and what of its restless theologian? You stir us and we delight to
praise you, who made us yoursand so the heart within us is restless
until it rests in you (conf. 1.1.1). This is the psalm of the celestial city
on pilgrimage. In its anticipation of life with the angels (civ. Dei 12.1),
it is a city that travels light and aims high; all the heaviness of the trip
derives from the mysterious entanglement of above with below, of
heaven with earth. I say mysterious because it is not clear that such
entanglement is even possible. What does a death or a birth really
have to do with a life thats eternal? Augustine tries to take credit for
the mystery (he calls it the blame) when he owns up to his sin and that
of Adam before him. But his God dispossesses him of his defeats
as readily as his victories and gives him his life. He is himself the
mystery of entanglement, but not its cause. The question for him and
for every other citizen of the two cities, become one in this life,
is whether a life is ever received in the possessing. The restless theolo-
gian suggests not. He wants to give his heart back, and, by giving it
back, he hopes to keep it.
Naturally I would like to know, as one of those dual citizens,
whether Augustines kind of restlessness is ever resolved. But this is
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE
125
like asking for an epilogue to time itself. Augustine almost gives one,
or a promise of one, when he tries to imagine what time looks like
from Gods point of view (conf. 11.31.41):
If a mind is equipped with so great a knowledge and prescience that
all things past and future are known to it, as, say, a very familiar
psalm is known to me, then certainly this mind is a marvel beyond
measure, stupendous to the point of inspiring awe. To such a mind
nothing of the ages is hidden, nothing done, nothing remaining to
be done, just as when I am singing that psalm, it isnt hidden from
me how much of the psalm I have sung, how much I have left to
sing. But perish the thought that you, the creator of the universe,
the creator of souls and bodies, know all things past and future
this way. Your way is by leaps and bounds more marvelous and
more hidden.
Augustine has here refused himself the consolation of an analogy.
He will not let those brief times when he feels at one with his know-
ing shape his expectation of the divine intelligence. But why not?
Whats the harm? Granted, when he is singing a familiar psalm, his
mind is still distended; his awareness has to reach back into what is
no longer and forward into what is not yet. If the time covered
remains relatively short, however, his mind need not distend much.
Augustine, signing a psalm, is hardly the paradigm of an agonized
consciousness, distending into non-being. On the other hand, how
odd that I should think this. I must have forgotten what a psalm is
and why Augustine likes to sing them. I can, of course, now try to
make a virtue out of my flattened perspective. It doesnt matter,
I insist, what the content of Augustines memory is. All that matters
is that the thing to be remembered be brief. Let him be singing
a childs ditty or reciting his ABCs. Anything trivial and short will
do. But now notice. The closer I bring God to a mildly distended
human mind, the more I am driven to trivialize my human aware-
ness of time. I cannot be thinking about life and death, good and
evil, when I have time only briefly in mind. Augustine is right.
Not only am I nowhere near the mystery of Gods time; I am running
in the other direction. I am running by leaps and bounds away
from incarnation.
Augustines refusal of the comfort of analogy is the great refusal
of his theology. He embraces a mystery in order to avoid falling for
126
a lie. The lie is that he is most himself when he is nearest a self-
contained intelligence. The mind that took in all of time and made
it seem like a psalmalbeit without the quality of praisefor a
moment looked divine to him. It was almost an epilogue, but not
quite. Thank God.
127
SUGGESTED READINGS,
CHAPTER BY CHAPTER
CHAPTER ONE
A heritage transformed
Cochrane, Charles Norris. Christianity and Classical Thought: A Study of
Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine. Rev. edition. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1944. [An argument for thinking of Augustinian
Christianity as a radical reformulation and critique of classical philosoph-
ical ambitions.]
Herdt, Jennifer A. Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. [Habitation to virtue is
an Aristotelian notion that Augustine calls into question. Herdt offers
a judicious assessment of the nature, limitations, and legacy of the
Augustinian critique.]
Marrou, Henri-Irne. Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique. Paris:
E. De Boccard, 1938; Retractatio [A reconsideration]. Paris: E. De Boccard,
1949. [Marrou struggles to determine whether Augustines transformation
of classical paideia is primarily the story of an ending or a beginning.]
Pollmann, Karla and Vessey, Mark, ed. Augustine and the Disciplines: From
Cassiciacum to Confessions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
[Essays that explore Augustines debt to and departure from the liberal
arts; the introduction is especially helpful.]
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2008. [Wolterstorff argues forcefully that Augustine
breaks from classical fixation on happinessa sea-change in the history
of philosophy; see pp. 180206.]
Stoicism in Augustine
Colish, Marcia. The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.
Volume II. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985. [The best exposition of the sum of
Augustines Stoic borrowings.]
Sorabji, Richard. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to
Christian Temptation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. [Sorabji
casts Augustine as an influential misreader of Stoicism; see especially
pp. 372384.]
SUGGESTED READINGS, CHAPTER BY CHAPTER
128
Death and grief
Cavadini, John. Ambrose and Augustine De Bono Mortis. In The Limits
of Ancient Christianity: Essays in Honor of R. A. Markus. Ed. William
Klingshirn and Mark Vessey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1999, pp. 232249. [Cavadini makes salient Augustines sense of the evil of
death, the contrary pull of a Christian Platonism notwithstanding.]
Helm, Paul, Augustines Griefs, and Wolterstorff, Nicholas, Suffering
Love. Both reprinted in Augustines Confessions: Critical Essays.
Ed. William E. Mann. Lantham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
2006, pp. 147160 and pp. 107146 respectively. [A contrast of
perspectives.]
Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Random House, 1988.
[Pagels sympathizes with the Pelagian attempt, contra Augustine, to
naturalize death and remove its stigma of punishment; see pp. 127150.]
Augustine and Cicero
Foley, Michael. Cicero, Augustine, and the Philosophical Roots of the
Cassiciacum Dialogues. Revue des tudes Augustiniennes 45 (1999) 5177.
[Foleys well-argued thesis is that Augustine styled his early dialogues,
written at Cassiciacum, as responses to a Ciceronian paradigmwith one
exception.]
Graver, Margaret. Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4.
Translation and Commentary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002. [Graver does not bring Augustine into her commentary, but her
treatment of Cicero is quite relevant to Augustines understanding of
emotion, grief especially.]
Testard, Maurice. Saint Augustin et Cicron. 2 vols. Paris: tudes Augustiniennes,
1958. [Still the classic exposition of Augustines Ciceronian borrowings.]
Augustine and Pelagius
Bonner, Gerald. Augustine and Pelagianism. Augustinian Studies 24 (1993)
2747. [A summary account of the development of Augustines anti-
Pelagian theology, but also a critique.]
Brown, Peter. Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environment.
Journal of Theological Studies 19 (1968) 93114. [Brown has a compelling
sense of Pelagianisms classical pedigree.]
De Bruyn, Theodore, trans. Pelagiuss Commentary on St Pauls Epistle to the
Romans. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. [In his commentary Pelagius
appears to be familiar with Augustines forays into Romans, most notably
his responses to Simplician. From a Pelagian point of view, Augustine
goes off the deep end when he reads Paul to be suggesting that guilt is
heritable and election gratuitous. Pelagius avoids similar errors in his
own commentary.]
129
Augustines Manicheism
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New edition. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000. [The chapter on Manicheism is
an extraordinary offering in an extraordinary book; see pp. 3549.]
Clark, Elizabeth. Vitiated Seeds and Holy Vessels: Augustines Manichean
Past. In Ascetic Piety and Womens Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christi-
anity. New York: Edwin Mellen, 1986, pp. 291349. [A brilliant assessment
of Augustines crypto-Manichean ambivalence toward reproduction,
following the lead of Julian of Eclanum, Augustines great late-in-life
antagonist.]
CHAPTER TWO
The will
Arendt, Hannah. Willing. Volume Two of The Life of the Mind. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978. See pp. 84110: Augustine, the first
philosopher of the Will. [Arendt, a great philosopher in her own right, is
one of Augustines best readers.]
Dihle, Albrecht. The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1982. See pp. 123144. [Dihle stresses Augustines
conceptual innovation.]
Harrison, Simon. Augustines Way into the Will: The Theological Significance
of De Libero Arbitrio. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. [In a close
reading of Augustines most analyzed early work, Harrison associates
the will with the irreducible integrity of a first-person point of viewan
exercise of the Augustinian cogito.]
Kahn, Charles. Discovering the Will: From Aristotle to Augustine. In
The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy.
Ed. J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988, pp. 234259. [Augustine innovates by way of his theological
concept of will, but on Kahns account he is more bricoleur than
magician.]
Evil
Evans, G. R. Augustine on Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982. [A survey of Augustines evolving sense of the problem
of evil.]
Mathewes, Charles. Evil and the Augustinian Tradition. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001. [In terms of metaphysics, evil is a
privation of goodness; psychologically speaking, it is more a perversion.
Mathewes plays out these two sides of Augustines theory of evil
in twentieth century Augustinianism. Hannah Arendt and Reinhold
Niebuhr figure prominently.]
130
Augustine and Plotinus
Cary, Phillip. Augustines Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a
Christian Platonist. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. [Cary notices
an unresolved, perhaps irresolvable, tension in Augustine between his
Platonically inspired interiority and his devotion to Christ. The thesis
is not new, but Carys development of it is.]
Courcelle, Pierre. Recherches sur les Confessions de saint Augustin. Paris:
E de Boccard, 1950; expanded edition, 1968. [A landmark study, shaping
decades of scholarship on Augustines Platonism; Courcelle makes the
case for the interpenetration of Christian and Platonist intellectual culture
in Milan, where Augustine met up with Ambrose and his circle.]
Kenney, John Peter. The Mysticism of Saint Augustine: Rereading the Confes-
sions. London: Routledge, 2005. [The best recent account of Augustines
contemplative theology; the pagan Platonism of Plotinus serves as foil.]
McGroarty, Kiernan. Plotinus on Eudaimonia: A Commentary on Ennead
1.4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. [A treatise that comes late in
the life of Plotinus; it supplies an apt entry into the ethics and metaphysics
that liberated Augustine from his materialism.]
Menn, Stephen. Augustine and Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998. [Dont let the title deter you; Menn offers a detailed and illu-
minating analysis of Augustines reception of Plotinian metaphysics,
especially its notion of Mind. Note especially pp. 185206, the section on
Christianity and Philosophy.]
Rombs, Ronnie J. Saint Augustine and the Fall of the Soul: Beyond OConnell
and His Critics. Washington, D. C.: Catholic University Press, 2006.
[Both a well-tempered assessment of Robert J. OConnells controversial
reading of Augustines debt to Plotinus and a good introduction in its own
right to Augustines Platonism.]
Time and memory
Cavadini, John. Time and Ascent in Confessions XI. In Augustine:
Presbyter Factus Sum, ed. J. Lienhard, E. Muller, R. Teske. New York:
Peter Lang, 1993, pp. 171185. [Cavadinis Augustine is less ambivalent
than Marrous (see below) about the goodness of time.]
Marrou, Henri-Irne. LAmbivalence du temps de lhistoire chez Saint
Augustin. Montreal and Paris: Librairie J. Vrin 1950. [Still the classic
account of Augustines ambivalent valuation of historical time.]
Matthews, Gareth. Augustine on Reading Scripture as Doing Philosophy.
Augustinian Studies 39.2 (2008) 145162. [The scriptural text at issue
is the first verse of Genesis. Matthews follows Augustine into a detailed
meditation, exegetical and philosophical, on the divine creation of time.]
Augustine and Petrarch
Gill, Meredith J. Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy
from Petrarch to Michelangelo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
131
2005. [Includes a fine discussion of the Augustinian moment in Petrarchs
ascent of Mount Ventoux; see chapter three, Petrarchs Pocket,
pp. 99111.]
CHAPTER THREE
Augustine and sexuality
Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation
in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
[See Chapter 19, pp. 387427. Brown situates Augustines struggle for sex-
ual continence within the context of late antique asceticism.]
Cavadini, John C. Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual
Desire. Augustinian Studies 36:1 (2005) 195217. [A daringly provocative
rehabilitation of Augustines portrait of passionless sex in Eden. This
essay is becoming something of a classic among Augustine scholars
particularly the ethicists.]
Lamberigts, Mathijs. A Critical Evaluation of Critiques of Augustines
View of Sexuality. In Augustine and his Critics. Ed. Robert Dodaro and
George Lawless. London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 176197. [Mostly focused
on Julians critique of Augustines obsession with concupiscence, but
mindful of modern sensibilities as well.]
Power, Kim. Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women. New York: Continuum,
1995. [A comprehensive survey of what Augustine wrote about women,
laced with psychological and anthropological analysis.]
The unnamed partner
Danuta, Shanzer. Avulsa a Latere Meo: Augustines Spare Rib. The
Journal of Roman Studies 92 (2002) 157176. [An essay on the allusiveness
of Augustines Latin in conf. 6.15.25. The play on and against Gen 2:2224
is showcased. I owe a great deal to Shanzers reading.]
Miles, Margaret R. Not Nameless but Unnamed: The Woman Torn from
Augustines Side. In Rereading Historical Theology: Before, During, and
After Augustine. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2008, pp. 127148.
[A sober assessment of what we can claim to know about the mother of
Adeodatusnot her subjectivity.]
Conversion
Fredriksen, Paula. Paul and Augustine: Conversion Narratives, Orthodox
Traditions, and the Retrospective Self. Journal of Theological Studies
37 (1986) 334. [Augustine tells the story of his conversion more than
10 years after the fact, and he draws on exegetical and existential perspec-
tives he simply could not have had at the time. Frediksen helps us think
through the implications of this. Aside from its illumination of Augustine
132
in particular, her essay is a contribution to a philosophy of historical
reconstruction.]
James, William. Varieties of Religious Experience. [The classic work that
continues to shape much of the contemporary debate over the experiential
dimensions of the religious life. James, like Augustine, suggests two, super-
ficially conflicting models of conversion: the quick flash in the soul of a
transforming insight and a lifetimes labor in virtue.]
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. [A good antidote to the
notion, disastrous when applied to Augustine, that mystical consciousness
depends on having a certain, ineffably sensational kind of experience.]
Wills, Garry. Saint Augustines Conversion. New York: Viking Penguin,
2004. [Wills translates book 8 of the Confessions with his usual panache
and adds a commentary, much of it directed against the myth of
suddenness.]
Paul in Augustine
Burns, Patout. The Development of Augustines Doctrine of Operative Grace.
Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1980. [A patient exposition of Augustines
unfolding sense of how grace works; much of the development passes
through Paul.]
Fredriksen, Paula. Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews
and Judaism. New York: Doubleday, 2008. [Part Two of this book, The
Prodigal Son, weaves together Augustines readings of Paul, Romans
especially, into a narrative of his theological coming of age.]
Stendahl, Krister. The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of
the West. In Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1976, pp. 7896. [Augustine finds in Paul an apostle who is exquisitely
sensitive to inner moral struggle. Perhaps he invents the Paul he finds. This
is a landmark essay.]
Trinity
Augustine. The Trinity. Trans. Edmund Hill, O. P. Brooklyn: New City Press,
1991. [Hills introduction to Augustines massively complex text is a
marvel of concision and insight. The notes are very helpful too.]
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trini-
tarian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [The chapter
on Augustine, an analysis of the grammar of his theology, illuminates
both the spirit and the letter of his Trinitarian thinking.]
Stark, Judith Chelius. Augustine on Women: Made in Gods Image, But
Less So. In Feminist Interpretations of Augustine. Ed. Stark. University
Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, pp. 215241.
[Stark situates Augustines notorious passage in The Trinity about women
and the image of God (Trin. 12.7.10)they bear the image, but not qua
133
womenwithin the broader argument of books 1215; she nurtures the
hope that Augustines Trinitarian appreciation for diversity within unity
offers an alternative to his exclusion of womens bodies from divinity.]
TeSelle, Eugene. Serpent, Eve, and Adam: Augustine and the Exegetical
Tradition. In Augustine: Presbyter Factus Sum. Ed. Joseph T. Lienhard,
Earl C. Miller, and Roland J. Teske. New York: Peter Lang, 1993,
pp. 341361. [This essay includes a nuanced discussion of book 12 of The
Trinity, where Augustine sets for himself the complex task of speaking
both about what is inwardly shared by males and females and about what
inwardly and outwardly differentiates them.]
Use and enjoyment
ODonovan, Oliver. Usus and Fruitio in Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana
I. Journal of Theological Studies 33.2 (1982) 361397. [ODonovan
downplays the importance to Augustine of the distinction between use
and enjoyment. It is a thought experiment that he soon abandons.]
Gregory, Eric. Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of
Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
[Among its other virtues, this book contains the best recent discussion
in the literature of Augustines controversial distinction between use and
enjoyment. See chapter 6, especially pp. 335350. Gregorys animating
concern: How might the Augustinian tradition reconcile love for neighbor
with the love of God?]
The inner teacher
Burnyeat, Miles. Wittgenstein and Augustine De magistro. Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society. Supplementary Volume 61 (1987) 124; reprinted
in The Augustinian Tradition. Ed. Gareth B. Matthews. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1999. [An influential attempt to divorce Augustines
reflections on teaching, sign language, and inner eye-witness from their
theological context.]
Madec, Goulven, De magistro: Langage et connaissance. In Saint Augustin
et la philosophie: Notes critiques. Paris: tudes Augustiniennes, 1996,
pp. 5360. [Madec, here and elsewhere, fights the good fight against
atheological readings of Augustines philosophy.]
ALMOST AN EPILOGUE
Augustine and Virgil
MacCormick, Sabine. The Shadows of Poetry: Vergil in the Mind of Augustine.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. [Virgil is still a frontier in
Augustinian Studies, where Plotinus and Cicero are given pride of place.
This is a pioneering work.]
134
Donatism and religious coercion
Bowlin, John. Augustine on Justifying Coercion. Annual of the Society of
Christian Ethics 17 (1997) 4970. [Without trying to justify Augustines
justification of coercion, Bowlin concocts the right tonic for overly self-
confident liberal indignation. Stay tuned for his new book, On Tolerance
and Forbearance: Moral Inquiries Natural and Supernatural.]
Kaufman, Peter Iver. Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. [A meditation on the
imperfection of all politics. Kaufman shows us how to be indebted to
Augustine without having to be his apologist.]
Markus, R. A. Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine.
Revised Edition. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1970. [The
most influential study in the literature on the co-mingling of Augustines
two cities. The chapter on coercion, Coge Intrare: The Church and Politi-
cal Power, attempts to account for why Augustine missed the issue of the
separation of powers, Church versus State (p. 149): The reason why it did
not occur to Augustine to restrict the scope of the states proper sphere of
action when he was thinking about religious coercion is simple: it did not
occur to him to think in terms of the state at all in this context.]
ODonnell, James. Augustine: A New Biography. New York: HarperCollins,
2005. [The chapter on Donatism, entitled The Augustinian Putsch in
Africa, is both highly unsympathetic to Augustine and utterly riveting.]
The political Augustine
Dodaro, Robert. Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [Dodaro refuses, quite
rightly, to remove the theology from the political thought, to remove
Christ from the theology.]
Gregory, Eric. Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of
Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
[Gregory refracts three varieties of modern liberalismrealist, procedur-
alist, civicthrough the lens of Augustinian theology and discovers the
lineaments of a politics of love. His aim is not to liberalize Augustine
but to use Augustines inspiration to deepen the political debate over the
nature and future of liberalism.]
Kraynak, Robert P. Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics
in the Fallen World. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001.
[Kraynak argues that the tension between Augustines two cities is as
modern as it is ancient. He uses the Augustinian framework to critique the
notiona modern fiction, he thinksthat politics takes place on neutral
ground, where certain inalienable human rights have to be assumed.]
Wolin, Sheldon. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought. Expanded Edition. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2004. [See Chapter Four, Sections IV to VII. Wolin finds in Augustine
135
a depoliticized conception of time and a disposition to emphasize social-
ity over political power (p. 117): The superiority of the social over the
political was a fundamental position in Augustines thought.]
Neo-paganism and its Augustinian animus
Connolly, William E. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political
Paradox. Expanded Edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991. [Connolly is a political theorist of postmodern proclivities, and
Augustine is the enemy that he loves the most. His Letter to Augustine
(pp. 123157) is not to be missed.]
Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1966. [It wasnt just about the triumph of science
over superstition. The Enlightenment was a revival of classical sensibilities,
more Roman than Greek, more pagan than Christian. This is the book to
read to begin to get an understanding of the modernity that Augustine did
not inspire.]
Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Second
Edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. [Milbank appropriates Augustines
critique of pagan virtue and turns it into a means to define a Christian
postmodernism. No other kind is going to be especially plausible or
palatable to him. See especially Milbanks last chapter, The Other City:
Theology as a Social Science.]
136
GENERAL SUGGESTIONS FOR
FURTHER READING
BIOGRAPHIES
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. A New Edition with an
Epilogue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. [This book is
more than a biography. We get both the inner life of an extraordinary
man and an insiders view to a time periodlate antiquitythat emerges
with its own claim to uniqueness. It hard to say whose genius is most in
evidence here, Augustine or Browns. The book is such a good read it is
even harder to care about the difference.]
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986. [More a history of Augustines mind than his life,
but still broadly biographical and interspersed with illustrations. As the
title suggests, Chadwicks book is not long. His erudition is nevertheless
evident throughout.]
ODonnell, James J. Augustine: A New Biography. New York: HarperCollins,
2005. [This is more or less the unauthorized biography of Augustine. It
emphasizes Augustines extraordinary ability to manipulate his self-image,
helped along by the navet of his readers. ODonnells achievementand
it is considerablecontinues to ruffle the feathers of many an Augustine
scholar. I confess that for me his book was a guilty pleasure.]
Wills, Garry. Saint Augustine. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999. [Wills brings
a lively literary style to his classical erudition. He is especially good at get-
ting the goods on Augustines affective life (p. xx): I shall be arguing, for
instance, that he tells us far more about his mistress, and about the son
they conceived and raised, than earlier biographers have recognized.]
PHILOSOPHICALLY MINDED SURVEYS
Burnell, Peter. The Augustinian Person. Washington, D. C.: Catholic University
Press, 2005. [A careful look at Augustine through the lens of the great
thesis (p. 195): that ultimately the various human modes of unity resolve
into one, that all reality has a sole, supreme principle.]
Matthews, Gareth B. Augustine. Oxford, Blackwell, 2005. [For an analytic
treatment of discretely philosophical topics in Augustine, this book is an
GENERAL SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
137
excellent choice. A few of the offerings: the Augustinian cogito, mind
body dualism, time and creation, the problem of evil.]
Rist, John. Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994. [Rist writes (p. 1): Our subject, under its broadest
description, is the Christianization of ancient philosophy in the version
which was to be the most powerful and the most comprehensive. For
philosophically engaging history of philosophy, this book has few rivals;
none in Augustinian Studies.]
THEOLOGICALLY MINDED SURVEYS
Burnaby, John. Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine. Eugene,
Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 1835. [Burnaby contests Anders Nygrens influential
thesis that Augustine was too enamored of Platonic eros to have grasped
Christian agape. More than that, his study is its own meditation on divine
love, with Augustine as guide.]
Harrison, Carol. Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. [A beautifully crafted amalgam of
theological reflection and contextual analysis. From the forward (p. xii):
The first three chapters examine the philosophical, literary, and ethical
aspects of Augustines cultural context; the last three chapters consider the
social context for Augustines reflections upon the Church, forms of
Christian life in the world and the nature of the two cities.]
TeSelle, Eugene. Augustine the Theologian. New York: Herder and Herder,
1970. [A comprehensive account of Augustines theological development.
TeSelle sorts out the constants from the variables very deftly (p. 347): The
unity of his thought is not the conceptual unity of a single system but the
coherence of a single life animated by a passion for the truth and open to
whatever might be learned about the one God and the one complex cos-
mos over which he rules.]
ESSAY COLLECTIONS
Battenhouse, Roy W., ed. A Companion to the Study of St. Augustine.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1955. [An old collection, but one that
has worn surprisingly well. It is a good source for getting a sense of the
Protestant appropriation of Augustine. Part Two is a critical guide to
Augustines major works.]
Dodaro, Robert and Lawless, George, ed. Augustine and his Critics.
New York: Routledge, 2000. [Augustine has inspired controversy, both
ancient and new. These essays take up the major bones of contention
and assess whether he still has a leg or two to stand on. Sometimes
Augustine comes off looking stronger, sometimes not.]
Matthews, Gareth B., ed. The Augustinian Tradition. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999. [This eclectic collection gives evidence of Augustines
capacity to inspire minds across a wide range of temperaments. Note,
for instance, the contrast between Alvin Plantingas offering and that of
138
Richard Eldridge: the difference between a clarions call to Christian
philosophy and a literary meditation on the souls ambiguities.]
Paffenroth, Kim and Kennedy, Robert P., ed. A Readers Companion to
Augustines Confessions. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003.
[There is a separate essay on each of the thirteen books of the Confessions.
Each essay takes its book to be the key to the whole.]
Stump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman, ed. The Cambridge Companion
to Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. [A wide-ranging
collection of essays, mostly analytic in approach. Some of the topics cov-
ered: free will, original sin, memory, predestination, biblical interpretation,
time and creation, Augustinian ethics, Augustines medieval and modern
legacy. James ODonnell, one of Augustines best biographers, contributes
the opening essay on Augustines life and times.]
ANTHOLOGIES
Atkins, E. M. and Dodaro, R. J., ed. Augustine: Political Writings. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001. [A portrait of Augustines political
wisdom, delivered through sermons and letters.]
Burleigh, J. H. S., ed. Augustine: Early Writings. Philadelphia: The Westminster
Press, 1953. [An excellent selection of texts, ranging from Augustines
retreat at Cassiciacum to the first work of his episcopate. Burleigh follows
Augustines own suggestion that in his second response to Simplician, he
began a new phase of his theologythe later one.]
Burnaby, John, ed. Augustine: Later Writings. Philadelphia: The Westminster
Press, 1955. [Selections from The Trinity, abbreviated Homilies on the
First Letter of St. John, the full text of the underappreciated anti-Pelagian
treatise, The Spirit and The Letter. Burnaby (p. 14): The selection has
been made in order to provide examples of the finest works of Augustine,
as speculative and mystical theologian, as Doctor Gratiae, and as preacher
of Charity.]
Harmless, William, ed. Augustine In His Own Words. Washington, DC:
Catholic University of America Press, 2010. [By far the best anthology
that is currently available. The selections take in major works and contro-
versies and put forward an Augustine of multiple personae: philosopher,
exegete, bishop, theologian, and preacher. This is a comprehensive but not
overburdened look at the sum of Augustines career. Harmless is very
adept at setting a context.]
REFERENCE WORKS
Fitzgerald, Allan D., O. S. A., ed. Augustine through the Ages: An Encylopedia.
Grand Rapids, MI.: Eerdmans, 1999. [The standard one-volume reference
on Augustine and his legacy. The entries, nearly five hundred of them,
are prefaced by tables of Augustines works, their abbreviations (which
I follow), their dating, Latin editions, English translations.]
139
Mayer, Cornelius P., ed. CAG 2: Corpus Augustinianum Gissense. Second
Edition. Basel: Schwabe, 2004. [Augustines Latin texts on CD-ROM. The
search engine is powerful and relatively easy to use. Includes an extensive
bibliography.]
ODonnell, James J., ed. Augustine: Confessions. 3 volumes. Text and
Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. [A monumental achievement.
The first volume, the Latin text, is a refinement of the efforts of Skutella
(1934) and Verheijen (1981). The subsequent two volumes of commentary
illuminate Augustines confessional use of scripture and scriptural language,
follow connections to his other works, canvas modern scholarship, and
contextualize the big issues of interpretation.]
This page intentionally left blank
141
Adam and Eve 14, 90, 99
Adams self-aggrandizement 901
Adams sin 867
Augustines reading of story of 9, 834
Eves sin 87, 94
fall of 68
Pelagian view 14, 16
redemption of Adam 93
womans role in Adams crisis 93
Adeodatus, son of Augustine 35, 99,
100, 103, 104, 11011
Aeneid (Virgil) 301, 1056, 11316, 1224
Alypius 1034
Ambrose, St. 103
angels
fall of 912
Antiochus of Ascalon 20
Antony, Saint 103
asceticism
Stoic and Manichean 278
Attic Nights (Aulus Gellius) 289
Atticus 17, 18
Augustine, Saint
adolescent law-breaking 3840
association with Faustus 234
baptism 1034
break from Manicheism 225
coercive practices 11922
conversion 95104
critique of Platonists 4950
disagreement with Pelagians 1314
historical placement 13
influence of Cicero 212, 23
influence of his mother 42
influence of Platonists 489, 55
influence on Petrarch 70
moment of illumination 103, 107
narcissistic self-portraiture 307
philosophical credentials 36
sexual partner/partnership 99100, 102
turn to Paul 668, 823
vision at Ostia 43
Augustine scholarship 10
Augustinians
and philosophical inquiry 46
beauty 57, 58
Augustines recollection of 602
God and 646
Platonist 64
belief 11718
body 64
souls descent into body 7982
soul without body 778
Caecilian 118
Caelestius 1314
celibacy
Augustines embrace of 95104, 106
Christianity
Platonism and 502
schism within North Africa 11819
church
Augustines notion 78
Cicero 12, 13
critique of Stoics 278
on emotions 1819
on grief 1721, 26, 28
influence on Augustine 212, 23
withdrawal from public life 1718
INDEX
INDEX
142
City of God (Augustine) 14, 18, 28, 32,
63, 91, 11617
Confessions (Augustine) 11, 13, 212,
26, 301, 32, 38, 41, 44, 51, 70,
73, 95, 100
Consolatio (Cicero) 18
continence 1013
corruptibility 57
cosmology
Manicheisms view of 22
death
of Christ 402
as evil and a punishment 16
virtue and 1317, 201, 26
dematerialization of value 26
demons
sin and 902
desire 18, 19
sexual 989, 105, 106, 107
for wisdom 4950
distress 18, 30
Peripatetic and Stoic debate on 1920
see also grief
Donatism 11819
declared a heresy 2
suppression of 11921
Donatus the Great 118
dualism
Manichean 245
Eden, garden of 1415, 84
sex in 99
election, doctrine of 45, 856
emotions
forms and objects of 1819, 201
Stoic view (via Cicero) 29, 31
empiricism 46
The Ends of Things Good and Bad
(Cicero) 20
Enneads (Plotinus) 48, 5860, 7980
Esau 6
Eve see Adam and Eve
evil 48
fallen angels 912
Faustus of Milevis 234
Gellius, Aulus 28
Gibbon, Edward 117
The Gift of Perseverance (Augustine) 13
God
absolute simplicity of 634, 656
act of betrayal 1212
beauty and 646
existence of 567
human image of triune 8790
of Manichees 53
of the Platonists 626
souls ascent to 812
Trinitarian bond 10910
grace 856, 118, 120, 122
human will and 458
play between sin and 25
radicalization of 67, 910, 107
grief
Augustines 2730, 43
Augustines theatrical 305, 378
Christs experience of 2930
Ciceros critique 1721, 26, 28
wisdom as cure for 18
guilt see inherited guilt
Honorius, Roman Emperor 2, 116
Hortensius (Cicero) 223, 24, 26
Hume, David 117
inherited guilt 834, 86, 945
inner conflict 1113, 1245
Jacob 6, 85
Jesus Christ 11112
betrayal of 1212
death of 402
experience of humanity 2930
incarnation 501
parable of a great dinner 11920
parenting and 104
perfection 15
Judas Iscariot 1212
Julian of Eclanum 14, 25, 98
knowledge
of earthly and temporal things 889
Eves taste of 94
INDEX
143
language learning see The Teacher
(Augustine)
Lazarus 29
life
vita versus corpus 64
logos 10511
loss
virtue and 1617, 1921, 26, 2830
Lucretius
disassociation of death from loss 16
lust (concupiscentia)
Augustines struggle with 956,
98101, 105
Eve and 87
mere sex and 105
Mani 22
Manicheism 16, 224
asceticism and 278
cosmology and 245
grief and 27
materialism and 53
practice of dematerialization 26
Marcellinus 116
Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor
disassociation of death from loss 16
marriage 97, 106
Monnicas plans for Augustines 99
materialism
differentiation and 534
Manichean 53
Plotinus on 58
memory see mind
mind
as inward theater 70
as memory 715
Monnica, mother of Augustine 2, 423,
99, 101
narcissism
Augustines confession of 358
Nebridius 35
neighbour-love 79
On Free Will (Augustine) 44, 68
On the Good of Marriage
(Augustine) 106
Origen 92
original sin
Augustines conception 9, 25, 834
Caelestius rejection of 1314
gender roles and 878
see also sin
paganism 117
parenting 104, 105
Patricius, father of Augustine 2
Paul, Saint 46, 102, 103, 121
Augustines Pauline turn 668, 823
Augustines reading of 623, 85, 87
Pelagianism 27
acceptance of naturalness of
death 16
disdain of Augustines doctrine of
original sin 1314
Pelagius 13
Peripatetic philosophy
on distressful emotions 1920
Petrarch 70
philosophical inquiry
Augustines view of 50
Augustinian vs. empiricist 46
Plato 3, 48, 50
Platonism/Platonists 66
Augustines will-spirit connection
and 4851
beauty and 64
Christianity and 502
God and 623
pleasure 1056
Plotinus 13, 48, 55
Augustines divergence from 823
on materialism 58
on place of unlikeness 589
on souls descent into body 7982
Porphyry 55
prodigal son, parable of 38, 467, 51
Augustines version 389
reason 723
regio dissimilitudinis see unlikeness,
place of
Reconsiderations (Augustine) 25
Rogatism 119
INDEX
144
Satan 92
Saul 856
self
Augustinian conception 1112
higher and lower selves 779
self-awareness 72
insights of 612
self-definition
importance of virtue to 15, 289
loss of someone and 357
self-discipline 1314
selfishness 87
self in 78
self-presence 725
sensed world 4
Platonists distinction between sinful
world and 4851
sexual desire 989, 100, 105,
106, 107
simplicity 634, 656
sin
appeal of sin itself 105
Augustines account of 389, 445
Augustines hesitations about
willfulness of 3940
demons and 902
grief over 30, 345
motive of 83, 86
penalty of 689, 84
play between grace and 78,
10, 25
as preference for temporal over
eternal goods 445
procreation and 9, 945
responsibility for 9
will to 447, 689
see also inherited guilt; original sin
Socrates 3, 50
Soliloquies (Augustine) 72, 73, 97
soul/spirit
All-Soul 80
ascent to God 812
descent into body 7982
divine inheritance 467
place of unlikeness and 5560
prodigality and 3940
self-willed corruption and 845
will and 4851
The Souls Immortality (Augustine) 73
Stoicism 27, 29, 49
asceticism of 278
theory of emotions 29, 31
practice of dematerialization 26
on preferable items 20
temptation 52, 56
theater
Augustine and 305, 378
Theodosius I, Roman Emperor 2
The Teacher (Augustine)
and language-learning 10811
time 706, 125
The Trinity (Augustine) 878, 90
truth
Augustines engagement
with 67, 24
Tullia, Ciceros daughter 17, 20
Tusculan Disputations (Cicero) 18
Two Souls (Augustine) 245
unlikeness, place of 5560
vice
struggle between virtue and 1314, 25
victory
a deflationary image (Virgils) 1056
Vincent, Rogatist bishop of
Cartenna 119, 121
Virgil 13, 301, 1056, 116, 117, 124
virtue
Augustines disagreement with
Pelagians on 1316
centrality of 13
divine favor and 456
losable goods and 1617, 1921,
26, 28
Volusianus, proconsul of Africa 116
weakness
Christs kind of 669
will 107
absoluteness of 44, 48
INDEX
145
differentiated 54
sin and 447, 689, 1056
spirit and 4851
wisdom
Christ as divine name for 23
as cure for grief 18
desire for infinite wisdom 4950
selfhood and 27
woman
Augustines figuration of 879
being born of woman 978
image of Trinity and 94
role in Adams crisis 93
Word made flesh 51
world
sensed versus intelligible 4851
146
Acts
9:119 86
Exodus
3:14 56
First Corinthians
4:7 46
7:89 97
11:7 889
First Timothy
2:14 87
Genesis
1:26 88
1:27 88
2:7 97
2:17 87, 901
2:18 90, 101
2:21 93
2:22 90, 93
2:23 93
3:6 39, 86, 87
3:7 93
3:12 91
3:20 94
3:24 84
John
4:18 29
6:33 41
11:38 29
Luke
14:1 120
14:1524 119
14:23 119
14:24 120
15:1132 38
15:3132 47
Matthew
8:8 1112
19:21 103
26:38 29
Psalms
18:6 41
Romans
1:20 55, 57
8:32 121
9 6, 85, 107
13:13 51, 52, 105
13:14 51, 95, 104
14:1 1034
INDEX OF BIBLICAL REFERENCES

Wetzel Augustine A Guide For The Perplexe

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Wetzel Augustine A Guide For The Perplexe

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

AUGUSTINE:

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

; Latin, perturbatio) that wrecks a persons

). So perhaps Cicero was not

)looks for reasonableness from the natural order and thus

) of imminent loss or gainthese come too quickly to be

) with free-form want and disorder and denies that we

), for Plotinus, is truths inner antithesis.

; enn. 1.8.13). Here is where some part of soul, clearly

; enn. 4.8.5) is to paste a label on an incoherence: for

) needs to be used advisedly here. Plotinus lets

), a unified form of divine

You might also like